“When I was a kid,” I told him, “and I realized I wasn’t like everyone else, you know what that made me do? It made me question everything, everything—and you know what I found out? I found out that everyone was lying to me: my parents, my school, my church, my country. When something comes from so deep inside you that it is beyond your understanding, then—you must judge everything by that standard.”
“But it’s not natural.”
“Yes it is—and you know why? Because it comes from inside me. Levi, you wouldn’t know anything about ‘God’ or Judaism unless you read a book or someone told you about it—everything you know about being a Jew comes from outside you. That’s not natural. I wasn’t taught to be homosexual: I am homosexual, and that’s a million times more natural than your being a Jew.”
“You’re talking about being an animal—”
“I’m talking about being a human being! And my wanting to have sex with another man is not the same thing as wanting to kill someone!”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Yes you did.”
“You can control your feelings,” he said.
“I don’t know where my feelings come from,” I told him. “A murderer does. A murderer is involved in very specific situations to which he responds.”
Levi regarded me for a moment, and then he suddenly changed the subject. “Do you like talking to me?”
“Sure, of course. You’re interesting and what’s really nice, compared to most people, is that you have a very definite point of view. That’s exciting.”
And then Levi spoke matter-of-factly what almost sounded like the supreme compliment: “I learn things from you,” he said.
“What?”
“I learn what homosexuals are like, why they are like they are.”
“That’s great. I think I’m a good representative for homosexuality. I’ve never been in a relationship, though. I mean, that is one way in which I am not like other queers. Most of the people I know may not be in a relationship, and maybe the ones they do have don’t last long, but at least they’ve had them. I’ve never been in a relationship at all.”
We were silent for a moment.
“So what’s the upshot?” I asked. “What are you finding out about ‘homosexuals’?”
“I don’t think you saw your father enough when you were a boy.”
He was giving back just what I’d told him the last time we’d spoken, no arguing with that.
A cab stopped at the corner, and as it pulled away the man who got out saw Levi and they greeted each other effusively. Suddenly Levi wasn’t the dour, defensive, and gloomy young man he always is with me. His eyes lit up and I could tell he felt let off a hook of some kind and was relieved that he had access to someone who could back him up. Levi introduced us and we shook hands. The guy’s name was Danny; he was a Jew in his early twenties with reddish-brown hair, a frizzy beard, wire glasses, and—as opposed to Levi—a more practical, less ethereal sensibility.
“He’s gay,” Levi said, explaining me to Danny.
Danny looked at me and I shrugged my shoulders.
Levi then defined my situation in more detail. “He’s sick.”
I spoke to Danny in a mock whisper, “Our argument basically comes down to this: I think my homosexuality is below my consciousness, that it is prerational, and Levi thinks I have a choice.”
Danny seemed to agree with me. “People don’t know why they’re gay. You probably don’t know why you’re gay.”
“But you don’t have to be gay if you don’t want to,” Levi interjected.
“But why would I want to have sex with a woman when I could have sex with a man? I think the erect penis is the most extraordinary thing in the world and I think a man’s ejaculation is the most spectacular exhibition of life there is—so why would I want to deny myself that?”
The defining of explicitly sexual terms must have signaled a terminus for the conversation because Levi and Danny started back across the street, leaving me rather abruptly, without even saying goodbye.
“Goodbye,” I called after them, in an effort to fill up the sudden silence. They looked back at me without answering.
And then I came home.
By paring down the civilities between us—by not saying goodbye—the understanding was affirmed between them that they weren’t homosexual themselves. I felt sure that if Danny had known I was queer before we were introduced he wouldn’t have shaken hands with me. A handshake validated me in a way that was not quite acceptable (all three of us were wearing black hats—might Danny have initially thought I was Jewish?).
It was late and I had to be up early, but I had a responsibility not to let Levi slip through my fingers, so I turned on my computer and started writing.
Tomorrow would just have to take care of itself.
33 / pennies
I came back from work about eight. I’d just bought some ice cream (chocolate-peanut butter swirl), and was about to sit down and enjoy it while I read the day’s paper, when I heard the sound of kids playing.
I got up and went outside and there was Yitzchak, in the middle of the walkway, and Moshe, sitting on one of the low brick walls bordering it. They both had skates on.
“Yitzchak. Moshe. How’s it going?” and I sat on the little wall opposite Moshe.
“ ‘How’s it going?’ ” Moshe mocked me.
“I’ve been working,” I said.
“So?”
“So—that’s why I haven’t been around.”
“ ‘That’s why I haven’t been around,’ ” Moshe mocked me again. Obviously, there were no right answers.
“School began yesterday,” I said, “but I can’t tell—is it high school, or just the beit midrash?”
“So what?”
“I’m interested,” I said.
“I know you are,” Moshe almost spit at me, as if that was the reason why he was being so nasty.
While we were talking, Yitzchak got up and went into my apartment to look for money.
“You know what I did today?” I asked Moshe rhetorically, trying to lighten his mood, change the subject, divert his attention, something, anything: “I stood in on a TV show for a fourteen-year-old Jewish boy.”
Moshe moved his head from side to side, parroting my words in a little singsong voice.
Oh, well. I tried. I sat still and contemplated him: the blue yarmulke on the back of his head, the peyos framing his face, and the little gap between his two front teeth. He wouldn’t look at me.
“We’re moving to New York in two days,” he suddenly said, still turned away from me.
“Really?” I asked, concerned. “In two days? Where? To Crown Heights? Where the riots were? Both of you or just you? Is your mother going? Are you going to live with your father? Are you coming back?”
Moshe made fun of my questions, as if they were all incredibly irrelevant, insults unworthy of being answered. “What’s Yitzchak doing?” he asked.
“He’s looking for money,” I told him. “Moshe, why are you mad at me?”
“You’re so stupid,” he said. “Give me your money.”
“I don’t have any money,” I said, suddenly thinking of the money I did have: “I have this,” and I showed him the check I had just received in the mail.
“Give it to me.”
“No. It wouldn’t do you any good anyway, because you’d have to get it signed to get it cashed.”
“How much is it?”
“For one day’s work,” I began rather grandly, “they paid me one hundred and sixty-four dollars, but after taxes I only get one hundred and fourteen dollars.”
“Give it to me and I’ll cash it.”
“No.”
Yitzchak came back outside and sat beside Moshe, opposite me.
“What were you doing?” Moshe asked him.
“He was looking for money,” I explained again.
“How much did you get?” Moshe asked. We could see Yitzchak had his hand balled in
a fist.
“Fifty cents,” Yitzchak said, and then, extending something in his other hand, he asked, “What’s this?”
Moshe took the object from him.
“That’s a light for when you go bicycle-riding at night,” I told him. “You put it on your leg and it shines so people can see you. Since it’s on your leg, it goes up and down.”
I could see Moshe weighing the object in his hand. I reached over, not to take it but to try the switch, to see if there was still a bulb inside. There was, but the battery didn’t work.
“Are you really moving to New York?” I asked Yitzchak, feeling he might be more responsive than Moshe.
He is shy anyway, but I wondered if his silence now was in deference to his older brother. It was strange to see them: Moshe in his belligerent, emotional mood, and little dreamy-eyed Yitzchak, watching, quiet.
“Are you coming back? Are you just going to visit? Are you both going?”
“Yes.”
Apparently this information hadn’t seemed too costly for Yitzchak to answer.
“If you’re going away I won’t get to see you anymore. I have to work tomorrow night—am I going to see you again?”
I suddenly felt panicked. If they really were going, and this was the last time I was going to see them, then—how could I see them enough? If they are so important to my stories, and I need to describe them, then—what? Who are they? How do they look? How do they sound?
Yitzchak went back into the apartment.
I looked at Moshe sitting opposite me, turned away, the bicycle light weighing in his hand.
“I’m going to miss you,” I told him.
He wanted to smash the light, to break it, but his upbringing conspired against his instinct, and when he threw the light across the yard it was with an ease that precluded its breaking.
The phone suddenly rang in my apartment and I got up and ran in to get it. As I dashed across the room to pick it up before the machine did, I saw that Yitzchak was on my bed and pulling back the covers and mattress to see if he could find any money under the head of the futon.
It was a friend of mine who just wanted to talk. While I stood there listening to him, I noticed my ice cream melting and then watched Moshe as he came into the room. I told my friend I was busy now, that I would call him back, and hung up the phone.
“Get off the bed,” Moshe ordered Yitzchak. “It’s full of dick germs.”
Yitzchak laughed at this concept and looked from Moshe to me, to see what I thought of what his brother had said.
Moshe glared at us and looked around the room almost desperately. He took a small battery-operated reading light from one of my bookshelves.
“That’s for reading when it’s dark,” I said, taking it back from him and examining it as if I’d never seen it before.
Moshe suddenly grabbed my hat, my beautiful black hat, and asked, “How much did this cost?”
“Fifty-five dollars.”
“Can I have it?” he asked.
“No. It’s my favorite piece of clothing. I’ve never paid so much for something to wear in my life.”
Moshe then started squeezing and mangling it, crumpling it up into a ball, which he then threw across the room. I felt reasonably certain it wouldn’t be too difficult to return it to its original shape, but I wasn’t nearly as disturbed by the attempted destruction of my property as I was by the violence of Moshe’s feelings and the sense that I had somehow betrayed him.
Was my absence so important, so crucial to him? Had my sitting outside all summer long, reading, day after day, been such a solace to him? Was there something he needed to tell me? Was there something more he wanted me to explain? Had my company meant so much then?
Did he really like me?
Could all of this have something to do with love?
I wondered if Yitzchak shared in these feelings. He was kneeling on the edge of my bed now, watching his brother. Moshe looked around and saw the big glass jar of pennies on one of my file cabinets. He reached up and took it. Yitzchak made some objection: he remembered when I’d told him and Yaakov that they could have any money they found on the floor but that the jar of pennies was my “desperation money.”
Moshe held the jar to his chest. “I’m going to take your money,” he said.
“I don’t care,” I told him.
He then skated out of the apartment.
When I didn’t make any objection to Moshe’s action, Yitzchak got up off the bed and followed his brother. “You have to split it with me!”
I sat still for a moment, completely disinclined to run after Moshe because of the money and then feeling the necessity of running after him for himself.
He and his brother were skating away down the sidewalk. “I’m going to miss you,” I called after them.
They continued on their way.
“I really like you.”
And then they were gone.
34 / avraham
Moshe and Yitzchak didn’t actually move to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, for another couple of weeks, but because I was working I only saw them a few times. When I was at home, Moshe acted resentful and never spoke to me again without being sarcastic.
The last time I saw Yitzchak, I asked him about it. “Why is Moshe mad at me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would you ask him why?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Why not?”
“Because then he would get mad at me.”
Yitzchak was looking at my binoculars again, this time trying to figure out how the focus worked and actually unscrewing some of the pieces and putting them together again. I told him that some of the pieces that turned didn’t come off, but that didn’t stop him.
After he’d gone, I tried looking through them, but one of the lenses was broken and the two separate images wouldn’t match up. Well, if anyone was going to break my binoculars, I was glad it was Yitzchak.
__________________
I continued to study the Jews.
I started buying The Jewish Journal each week, as well as the B’nai B’rith Messenger, which had a column by the Lubavitcher Rebbe on the Torah. In one of the issues I found out that the circled “U” on food products was administered by the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations. Over a period of a couple of months as a little project of my own, I went through every single product at my neighborhood market and listed each item that had a circled “U” on it: there were over four hundred!
Obviously, it was a much more widespread practice than I had imagined. And then I began to wonder if it might be part of some worldwide Jewish conspiracy (“And I will set a sign among them . . . and they shall declare my glory among the Gentiles”: Isaiah 66:19): after all, not only had they invented “God,” but they’d managed to get the whole Western world to actually worship one of their own! To say nothing of the fact that almost every boy born in the United States, including me, had part of his penis cut off before he even left the hospital!
And now they wanted to put their mark on all of our food!
Very scary.
I started reading Likutei Amarim (Tanya) by Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, the first Lubavitcher Rebbe. It was the most important book for Chabad, outside of the Torah, and they read a different section of it every day. It was the first book I’d ever read that went backwards, with the English on the right-hand pages and the Hebrew on the left.
It was tough going, but I read it carefully, using the glossary for almost every page. The general upshot of the book seemed to be an intellectual game in which Zalman was trying to reconcile the endless dichotomy of God Is One with the multiplicity of the world. Over and over, he states that God cannot be known and then goes on to offer what he knows.
On page 31, in the seventh chapter of the first part, I came across this:
. . . Therefore the sin of wasteful emission of semen is not mentioned in the Torah among the list of forbidden coitions, although it is even more heinous than they; an
d this sin is greater because of the enormity and abundance of the uncleanness and of the kelipot which he begets and multiplies to an exceedingly great extent through wasteful emission of semen, even more than through forbidden coitions . . .
Kelipot means “bark” or “shell” and is a term used to denote evil. Another term for evil is sitra achra, “the other side.” One day as I was passing in front of the school with my Tanya, some of the boys—who were amazed to see me reading one of their holy books—started talking to me. When one of the bochurs passed by and saw us speaking together, he told me to stay away from the school.
“What are you talking about?” I asked him, incredulous. “I live here.”
“I’m just warning you,” he said.
He turned away from me, but I advanced on his retreating back. “Why? Am I the kelipot? Am I the sitra achra?”
He didn’t answer me, but a shudder constricted his back.
I wondered when it happened: just when does the eager learning of these kids turn into the brutish defensiveness of their elders? Is it when they realize it’s all a lie but say yes to it anyway?
These poor despised people: in retaliation against a history of subservience, they make up a world of their own with which to defy creation—a world in which hope for a Messianic future denigrates the here and now, where the nationalist and racist assertion of the “chosen people” commands survival whatever the cost, where any effort is never good enough and self-pity blooms into righteousness, a world where beauty is evil and life, no longer reason enough for living, prevails only as an excuse for atonement.
And it was all predicated on the one “absolute”: the Torah was the word of God.
Therefore . . .
A smell of semen was in the air.
In the autumn there is a carob tree up the street that emits a heady pungent aroma and for several months each year I feel as if I were awash in sex. One afternoon, when I didn’t have to go to work, I set my things up outside to read. I was still trying to finish the Tanya. I was only wearing shorts and had on none of my Jewish accoutrements.
The Boys Across the Street Page 24