The Boys Across the Street

by Rick Sandford

  For some reason the bus didn’t leave and then the engine was turned off. Apparently they were waiting for someone. I went in the house and put my hat on, and came back outside.

  Several minutes later they turned the engine on again, and I got up and walked across the street to the window where Yitzchak was sitting. Looking up at him, I asked him where he was going.

  “Camp,” he said.

  “Where?”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “Well, have a really good time,” I told him and then I started back across the street. I had just gone a few steps when I turned around to see him again and wave. One of the bochurs was leaning over Yitzchak and pushing him back in his seat: “Don’t be a troublemaker.”

  Yitzchak started to say something, but again he was pushed back in his seat and once more the injunction was repeated: “Don’t be a troublemaker.”

  I was about to say something, but then thought better of it— I didn’t want to get Yitzchak into any more trouble than he already was. I returned to my stoop and watched the proceedings.

  Troublemaker.

  Yitzchak was a “troublemaker” because he was talking to me. How insidious that was.

  A moment later the bus finally started, and as it moved on up the street Yitzchak looked at me, no smile on his face, and I waved to him: I’m sorry.

  Surreptitiously, he managed a small wave back.

  31 / moshe

  “I can tell if someone is Jewish just by looking at them.”

  Moshe made this self-confident assertion to distract me from my reading as we sat outside in front of my apartment one day.

  “How?” I asked.

  “There’s something about the eyes, something about the way they look.”

  I looked around to see if there was anyone we could test this theory out on, but the street was pretty empty. A few minutes later, however, a good-looking man in his twenties with long black hair came by. He climbed the steps and said hello as he passed between us and started up the walkway. He was wearing a leather jacket, and I assumed he was a musician friend of the beautiful girl who lived in the back.

  After he was gone, I turned to Moshe. “Is he Jewish?”

  Moshe nodded his head. “Definitely.”

  “I bet he’s not,” I said. “We’ll ask him when he comes back.”

  I’d been rereading some of my stories and went back to them, but Moshe wouldn’t let me concentrate, and so we made small talk while we waited.

  About ten minutes later the guy came back, strolling along with a cool and self-assured manner.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “We were just wondering: Are you Jewish?”

  The guy stopped beside us and looked from me to Moshe and back again before answering. “No.”

  Moshe and I looked at each other and I stuck my tongue out at him. The guy was watching us, and so I gave him the explanation: “We had a bet going. He thought you were Jewish and I said you weren’t. I won.”

  The guy nodded his head as if he understood what we were talking about, and went on his way. If I’d heard right, he seemed to have been slightly offended at being asked such a question. But what did he expect from a man sunning himself in shorts and a black dress hat, and a little boy with fringes on his clothes and a skullcap on his head?

  I picked up one of my stories and started glancing through it again.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m checking my stories for mistakes,” I told him. “This one is about you—do you want to read it?”

  “Read it to me.”

  “Why don’t you read it for yourself?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “I like pictures.”

  And suddenly I felt as if a world had just opened up in front of me . . .

  Moshe didn’t like to read!

  To live in that environment, where such a premium was placed on scholarship, and not to like reading . . .

  Moshe suddenly stood up and came over beside me. “Tell me about sex.”

  I looked up at him. “What do you want to know?”

  “Tell me about it,” he insisted, and he put his hands on the arm of my chair and leaned over me.

  “You tell me,” I said.

  “What?”

  “What do you think sex is?”

  Moshe contemplated the question for a moment and then said, “Sex is when you act out your embarrassment.”

  I was amazed at his definition and repeated the words to myself so as not to forget them: Sex is when you act out your embarrassment.

  “How do you do it?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “When you touch yourself.”

  Moshe was still standing over me and now he was rubbing his crotch up against the arm of my chair. I felt a little nervous, looking up at this eleven-year-old boy—his determination only slightly softened by a seductive earnestness.

  “Moshe,” I said, “you should ask your father.”

  “My parents are divorced,” he said.

  “I know. But don’t you ever see him?”

  “He’s in Israel.”

  God—I felt so sorry for him. He didn’t like to read and his parents were divorced: he was certainly going to have a rough time of it for the next several years.

  “Tell me,” he said again, and he rubbed his crotch up against my elbow.

  I was a little embarrassed. “I don’t want to.”

  “Please! I’ll give you a dollar.”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “I’ll give you five hundred dollars.”

  “Moshe!” I exclaimed, and then answered him brusquely, “You just touch yourself.”

  “That’s all?” he asked.

  I shrugged again.

  I felt like such a coward, and I hated the fact that my embarrassment and my lack of forthrightness were based on the fear he’d tell his elders what I’d said. It is so important to be honest, and here I was afraid to be just that.

  Looking morose, he moved away from me and sat on one of the walkway’s little brick partitions.

  God, how I hated these false constrictions!

  If I wasn’t such a coward I would have just told him to come inside and I would show him.

  32 / the proposition

  In August the TV season started up again and I got a job standing in for a cute fourteen-year-old boy on a situation comedy. After more than four months of sitting outside my apartment reading, I was now getting up at five-twenty in the morning, cycling to the gym for a workout, and then catching a bus down to Culver City for work.

  What with my going to movies in the evening and seeing friends, my encounters with the boys were abruptly curtailed. After having been out later than usual one evening, I was cycling lazily home. I had on my black hat, loose black pants, white T-shirt, and sneakers: I looked like a casual Chassid. As I was riding down Waring I came to Poinsettia and saw one of the bochurs walking by himself. As I got nearer I noticed it was Levi, and I greeted him. He acknowledged me and so I circled back around in the street to talk to him.

  “I just got a book on Rabbi Schneerson,” I told him, “because you were reading one.”

  “What?” he asked.

  I told him I would show him and struggled with my backpack to get the book out, but before I could he said, “Despite All Odds?”

  “Yes! What did you think about it, do you think it’s any good?”

  “Some of it’s good.”

  “So, what do you think about New York?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “About the riots, about the Chassidic community—”

  “What should I think?” he asked rhetorically.

  I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know. I’m really asking. All I know is what I read in the papers, and you’re on the inside ...”

  In Brooklyn, a few days before, a car in Rebbe Schneerson’s motorcade had gone through a red light and the driver, in an effort to avoid the
oncoming traffic, had swerved his vehicle, jumped a curb, and killed a little black boy. Within hours the black community of Crown Heights was up in arms and a Lubavitcher from Australia had been stabbed to death. There’d been rioting ever since.

  “Are you liberal?” Levi asked, as he continued on down the street—answering my question with another question.

  I equivocated a bit as I walked my bike beside him. “Well, I’m way to the left of the Democrats, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Do you like blacks?”

  “I don’t know,” I began, a little uncertainly.

  He redefined his question for me. “Do you like them as people?”

  “Well, I don’t know any blacks, really. None of my friends are black,” and I ran through the black associations in my mind. “I’ve had sex with three black men. I’m not really attracted to them, though.”

  “Do you know who Al Sharpton is?”

  “No.”

  “Alton Maddox?”

  “No,” I said. “Who is Alton Maddox?”

  “He’s a big fat nigger.” Levi put it bluntly.

  I was listening: Yes?

  “He wants to kill—people,” Levi said.

  I nodded. Jewish people, no doubt.

  “They’re animals,” he said.

  We reached the corner and stood there for a moment in silence. I made to turn away, but Levi asked me if I was in a hurry. It was almost midnight and I had to be up at five-twenty in the morning, but—no, if Levi wanted to talk, I was willing to listen.

  We crossed the street and headed up my side of Alta Vista toward my apartment, where we paused.

  “You rent an apartment here?” Levi asked.

  “Yes.”

  Levi knew that: this was a stall of some kind.

  “One bedroom?” he asked.

  “One room,” I clarified.

  He was just standing there, and suddenly it occurred to me that he might want to come in, and so I asked him, “Would you like to see my apartment? Would you like to see where I live?”

  He indicated he would.

  This was a surprise. I lifted my bicycle and carried it up the three steps of the walkway and led the way to number 1. I leaned the bike on its kickstand, got my key out, opened the door, and turned on the light.

  It wasn’t as bad as it could have been although, after the night air, it was very stuffy. The bed wasn’t made and there were books and clothes strewn all over it. The floor was relatively clear of stuff, and the books on it were arranged in piles. The desk was littered with notebooks and paper but, for the most part, they were stacked neatly. Otherwise, the room was pretty much: books and more books, piled up, two deep, and lying everywhere you looked.

  I parked my bike and stepped toward my desk as Levi came in the room. “It’s kind of a mess, but this is it. That’s my bed—I sleep with my head at the end, because that’s what one of the characters in Ulysses did. This is my desk—and my computer—”

  “So you do live in the modern world,” he said.

  “Yes, my computer and my answering machine,” I said. “But that’s it. No TV, no car.”

  I pointed to the books on the bed to impress him, a whole selection of books about Jews: Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures, the Mishnah, The Indestructible Jews by Max I. Dimont, Judaism by Isidore Epstein, The Living Talmud/The Wisdom of the Fathers selected by Judah Goldin, and Legends of the Hasidim by Jerome R. Mintz.

  “I thought you’d have posters,” he said.

  “Well”—and I pointed to the poster above my desk—“that’s Follies, that’s the best musical I’ve ever seen, and a friend of mine gave me that one, Without You I'm Nothing, because I really liked it. Sweeney Todd is over there, and that’s Dublin,” I explained, pointing to a large map on the wall, “because I read Joyce, and I wanted to see where Ulysses took place.”

  (It wasn’t until later, when I started writing all this down, that I realized he probably thought there were going to be posters of naked men all over the room.)

  I looked around and noticed the photograph in the plastic frame propped against the wall. “Oh, and this is Aaron. He was my favorite Jewish boy,” and I handed the picture to Levi to look at.

  Aaron really was classic: the curly brown hair, the big nose, the full lips and sensitive eyes. Those Semitic ingredients which so often end in aesthetic disaster somehow combined in Aaron beautifully: he was the best Jew I had ever seen.

  “He’s dead,” I explained.

  “How did he die?”

  “AIDS.” What else?

  Levi handed the picture back to me. He was very noncommittal. I didn’t really know what to do, so I continued pointing things out: “Those are my notebooks by the desk, my Jewish books are over there on the second shelf. Oh, and”—taking from the bed the three-ring notebook in which I had arranged all my stories—“this is my book about you guys.” I turned to the title page: The Boys Across the Street.

  Levi feigned (or not?) indifference.

  We hovered in the middle of the room. There was no place for him to sit and I didn’t have anything to offer him. As he started moving back outside I realized that we might never be alone again. I’d thought about this before and I’d resolved that if I ever got the opportunity . . .

  “Would you like me to give you a blow job?” I asked.

  He stared at me with that noncommitting look of his and I suddenly got the feeling that this proposition of mine was the inevitable consequence of his conception of who I was.

  “No.”

  The question, in and of itself, was our consummation.

  “Well, you can’t say you weren’t asked,” I told him.

  He looked at me as we walked out toward the street. “Would you be interested in that?” he asked.

  “Well, sure. I mean, you’re nice-looking and you’re a virgin, so—yeah, I’d be interested in giving you your first blow job. And, you know, my experience has been that the men who are the most repressed have the strongest erections.”

  “I’m not a homosexual,” he said.

  I felt like leveling with him. “Levi—all my straight friends? They all like getting blow jobs.”

  “So, did you think I was going to say yes?” he asked me.

  “No. I mean, I was ninety-nine percent sure you were going to say no, but I wanted to give you the experience, I wanted you to at least be able to say, This guy wanted to suck my cock. I knew this guy once who made porno films. He was a world-famous cocksucker and he asked me if he could suck my cock.’ That’s all.”

  “I think you’re crazy,” he said, and we started walking together toward the corner on Waring.

  I shrugged my shoulders and sighed. “Okay. ‘Crazy’—meaning what?”

  “I think you’re absolutely out of your mind.”

  I shrugged my shoulders again. “That sounds like a negative value judgment. I know it doesn’t have to be—”

  “You’re not normal.”

  “Normal”—I was contemptuous.

  “You’re not like most people.”

  “Who wants to be like most people?” and I turned on him: “You’re not like most people.”

  “But you’re not living the way you’re supposed to.”

  “Supposed? According to who? I know, the Torah. The Torah says I should be killed.”

  “That’s just about Jewish homosexuals. That isn’t about you.”

  “Oh, only Jewish homosexuals should be killed. It doesn’t matter who I have sex with.” I was indignant. “In this book I read, Tzitzith by Aryeh Kaplan, it said that the world was created for the Jews—”

  Levi acknowledged this: “God made the world for the Jews.”

  “But I want the world to be created for me, too.”

  “You’re a part of creation—isn’t that enough?”

  I shook my head no. “I want to be a Jew. I want God to care about who I have sex with.”

  “Then you’ll have to convert,” he said.

  I humbled myself
before Levi with downcast eyes. “But I could never believe in God.”

  “So you’ll never be a Jew.”

  I threw my hands up: What are you going to do?

  “It’s a waste of time your reading all those books about Jews,” Levi said.

  “What do you mean, it’s a waste of time? I learn something all the time. I read Rabbi Schneerson’s biography and then I open the paper and there’s a story about him, and I already know about him. How can it be a waste of time?”

  “You’re sick,” he said.

  I held up my hands: Yeah, so?

  “You read books and you can talk, you’re not stupid, but you’re sick. So why don’t you kill yourself?”

  I shrugged my shoulders again: What could I say? “I’m happy—why would I want to kill myself?”

  “Because you’re sick.”

  “Well, obviously, I’m not ‘sick.’ But, if I was sick, I think I would kill myself—I’m not into pain and suffering at all. So, if I ever do get sick—”

  “How would you do it?” he asked me.

  That was interesting, and I had thought about it. “Do you remember hearing about that guy who set himself on fire to protest the war in the Persian Gulf? I thought that sounded pretty good. There’s getting drunk and taking the long swim to China, there’s jumping off the Grand Canyon—I’m not one for guns—”

  “What about poison?”

  “No. I really want to experience my death if I’m going to do it.”

  “Being a homosexual is like being a murderer—”

  “Levi!” and I started to reprimanded him. “Homosexuality is nothing like—”

  “Can I finish talking, please?”

  I acquiesced: Of course, please.

  “A murderer has all these feelings building up inside him, but if he wants to badly enough he can stop his desire to kill.”

  “Levi, I was queer since I was a little kid—I didn’t choose to

  be homosexual. It’s a fundamental part of who I am. Your analogy is false.”

  “But you’re not living the way you’re supposed to.”