Sex, Drugs & Gefilte Fish

by Shana Liebman

  I’m minorly irritated by it now, but at the time my faith in any kind of moral authority in the universe was irreversibly shattered. The Hebrews had prayed to a higher power and been delivered from bondage. My pleas, however, had been rebuffed. Unlike lazy Moses, who had a magic stick and the voice of God to guide him, I was going to have to take matters into my own hands.

  Of course there was only one way I knew how to do this: by running away. My skills had, over time, been honed for this kind of last-minute escape. Although none of my attempts were the end result of meticulous planning—more of a spur-of-the-moment response to an instance of bullying or unhappiness—I was always on the lookout for possible means of escape, or weak links in a summer camp’s security. The knowledge I had accumulated throughout my abbreviated stay would be used in that instance, but not in a systematic way. I merely felt the need to run and ran with it, without supplies or money.

  It helped that this particular camp was almost perfectly engineered for running away, having as its entrance a wide-open road that wound past small plots of farmland before ending directly in the middle of the nearest town. It was like the camp was daring me to escape, begging me even. Frankly, it’s a wonder I’d stayed as long as I did.

  As you can probably guess, things fell apart almost instantly. I’d barely made it a quarter of a mile before a pickup truck piloted by an incredibly large woman—I assume the spinster daughter of an ornery farmer who named her Bessie after his childhood cow—slowed down next to me. Having seen Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure many times, I began wondering what kind of strange and ridiculous escapades I was about to embark on, until she asked me whether I belonged at the nearby camp. I told her I wasn’t allowed to talk to strangers, which, since I was 14 at the time, was a pretty lame excuse. Giving me a look halfway between “I don’t believe you” and “you’re retarded,” she drove off in the direction I’d started from, returning a few minutes later with the camp director.

  Apparently this paragon of rural New Jersey samaritanism felt she’d done her civic duty, and left the two of us to return to camp on foot. The camp director wasn’t happy. A more accurate way to put it was that he was furious. For weeks I’d been a thorn in his side: reading books, not going to instructional swim, complaining about being pushed off chairs. Now I’d really crossed the line, and what I did next would decide how extreme my punishment would be. The trip back was silent and awkward. Except for the walk to the security check at Heathrow Airport on the last day of a trip to England that ended with my girlfriend breaking up with me, it is the most awkward walk I’ve ever been on. I actually have a very clear memory of the director whipping me in the back with a switch as we walked, though the rational side of my brain tells me that probably didn’t happen.

  When we got to the camp, I was taken to the reception desk in the administration building, where my parents were called. For the next 15 minutes or so I listened to them tell me how disappointed they were while staring at novelty office signs reading “You want it when?!” and “I can only help solve one person’s problems a day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn’t looking good, either.” I assume that’s also the sign on God’s desk. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore and threw the phone at the floor in anger and frustration.

  “That is IT, Mister! You are out of here!” shouted the camp director as I stumbled toward the exit. I realized that I was crying, big horrible tears that filled up my whole field of vision, making it hard for me to see where I was going. I put out my hands to push open the front door and somehow managed to push straight through its plate-glass panes. I guess I didn’t know my own strength when I was crying and ashamed. My right hand was cut deeply halfway between my thumb and pointer finger, blood dripping down my arm and onto the dirt outside the building. My hand is still scarred from the event, although now, a decade later, it looks more like a poorly placed wrinkle.

  I managed to stumble to the conveniently closely located nurse’s office, leaving a trail of blood behind me. I don’t know what people who came upon it later must have thought, although I assume they imagined something far more exciting had happened. The camp nurse bandaged my hand and showed me to a bed, where I instantly fell asleep. She was the nicest person I dealt with that day.

  When I woke up, my parents were there, and my things already packed. They seemed to have run out of anger on the drive up, and the ride back was, understandably, completely silent. It was my last summer in camp. It was also the last time I encountered Nosferatu. A few weeks after the events of this story, he was kicked out of camp for failing a drug test. I have to assume he’s working a low-paying janitorial job right now, or running a very successful hedge fund. Let’s compromise and say he’s a mercenary in the Sudan.

  Anyway, I consider this one my most successful escape. Some might argue with this, since it was a complete failure: I got caught, angered my parents, scarred my hand and had to eat at Ruby Tuesday’s on the way home (I hate Ruby Tuesday’s). Still, they say any landing you can walk away from is a good landing, and exoduses are the same way. Sure, the Hebrews had to wander through the desert for 40 years, but they never had to go back to slavery in Egypt.

  Helping Hand

  By Todd Levin

  ONE ESPECIALLY WARM AFTERNOON on summer break from college, I found myself sitting on the steps of a Conservative Jewish synagogue, eating ice cream. It seemed natural to experience a vague sense of guilt about this. For all my ignorance of Old Testament laws, enjoying a snack in front of a temple could reasonably be considered some kind of decadent affront to God—but since it was very hot and the ice cream was delicious, I just stored this incident in my mental “to atone for” list, and continued licking.

  A few peaceful minutes passed, then suddenly the synagogue doors burst open and the rabbi came running outside, heading right toward me, shouting my name. Thinking fast, I tossed my ice cream cone to the ground and screamed, “Unholy temptation, be gone!”

  I knew Rabbi Sussman, because this was my girlfriend’s synagogue. The rabbi and I never got along, perhaps because I am a Reform Jew and he is Conservative, and Conservative Jews often regard Reform Jews the same way waiters regard diners who wish to pay for their meal with coupons.

  Rabbi Sussman was not dressed in what I would describe as traditional Conservative Jewish attire, i.e., flowing robes, sandals, decorative dreidel pouch cinched around his waist and a cumbersome stone tablet cradled in each arm. Instead, he wore green surgical scrubs and latex gloves. “Wonderful,” I thought—“he’s lost his mind.” Alternately, this might have been a Purim costume, although it was August and Purim was back in March. Or October. Really, I had no idea. So as Rabbi Sussman approached I made a fist, just in case I was wrong about Purim and right about crazy.

  “Todd. Great to see you.”

  His warmth was suspicious, and I balled my hand up tighter, remembering not to tuck the thumb inside the fist because that could cause you to fracture your thumb while you’re punching the face of a rabbi. Then Rabbi Sussman turned all business: “I wonder if I can borrow you for a minute.”

  Even if he was insane, it’s very difficult to say no to a rabbi. And it’s even more difficult to say no to a rabbi dressed as a doctor. So many layers of authority working in harmony.

  So I stood up like an adult, dusted the rainbow sprinkles from my shorts and went to him. Rabbi Sussman threw an arm around me and I tensed up, wishing I still had that fist ready to go.

  “Listen, Todd. I could use a little help. My son, Akiva, usually gives me a hand but he’s at a Little League game today. So, what do you think? Can you give me a hand with a circumcision?”

  Absolutely not. “I will surely fail at this,” I thought. But then my brain shifted into more Old Testament thinking. “What if I’m being tested by God right now, like when God asked Abraham to sacrifice his only son, What’s-his-face? Maybe, if I say yes to this, when I enter the temple there will be no circumcision at all. And instead I’ll just be presented with a golden chalice or
World’s Greatest Jew coffee mug or something. Also, let’s not forget how very scared I am of Rabbi Sussman.” My decision was made.

  “Show me the penis,” I demanded.

  As we made our way into the synagogue, Rabbi Sussman pitched me the backstory. Apparently, his moyel skills were legendary in the tri-county area and, as such, he was occasionally retained to provide this service to non-Jewish families. Sussman performed these circumcisions after hours, usually in his office with the shades drawn, like some kind of Mafia surgeon.

  When we entered his office, the parents were standing off in a corner looking disoriented and sheepish, while their baby wriggled around on a blanket that was spread out across a cleared section of Rabbi Sussman’s desk. If seeing their newborn child nestled amongst haphazard stacks of manila folders and Wite-Out jangled these parents’ nerves, at least they could find some solace in knowing their moyel would be assisted by the best in the business—a teenaged boy in cutoff fatigue shorts and a white Hanes undershirt hand-lettered with the words, I’M CRUSHING YOUR HEAD. Where’s that baby, y’all? The party doctor is in.

  My responsibilities during the procedure were refreshingly nonsurgical. Turns out, the rabbi would be handling the more circumcision-y bits. While he prepped, clamped, sliced and discarded things (i.e., skin), I was required only to hold the baby’s legs perfectly still. In other words, I was the hired muscle. When asked if I was up to the task, I probably should have just kept quiet and nodded in the affirmative. Instead, I thought I’d loosen up the room with a joke. “This should be no problem at all,” I said. “I’ve held down plenty of babies.” High five, everyone.

  It’s a well-known fact that babies are kind of weaklings. If you’re ever surrounded in a gang fight, they say always attack the babies first to quickly even the odds. However, there are no self-defense manuals that prepare you for the superhuman, Hulk-like lower body strength a baby can summon once someone has attached a pair of forceps to his genitals. The instant its penis was clamped, the baby flipped some kind of internal berzerker switch. His thighs pumped so hard and fast I had to dig my heels into the carpet just to keep from being whipped around the room like a rag doll. Fortunately the sticky residue of ice cream on my hands helped me sustain a solid grip and filled the room with the sweet aroma of pralines.

  At some point during my life-and-death struggle with this infant, I made eye contact with the father. His expression was understandably troubled, so I started mouthing the words “I’m sorry” to him, over and over again. This was true, I was sorry—though I resisted sharing my other presiding sentiment, which was, “Your baby is acting like a real dick, pal.” And, though I didn’t know much about the entire surgical procedure—I have only a faint recollection of my own circumcision—I knew that the genital chokehold was by no means going to be the worst of it. And just as this thought occurred to me, the worst of it came.

  When Rabbi Sussman made his incision in the dorsal side of the foreskin, the baby produced a sound that had no place in a sanctuary of worship. In the realm of baby-screams this was unprecedented. In efforts to relate this story to friends, I’ve tried to find a suitable analogy to describe the specific character of that baby’s scream—a cat in a wood chipper? A wounded seagull with a megaphone attached to its beak? But nothing has sufficed. I think that’s because this scream sounded exactly like a baby who just had his penis chopped off. It was in a category all its own.

  The screams came in powerful waves. Each new bloodcurdling wail dovetailed with the receding echoes of the previous one, until we were totally enveloped within a seamless wall of shrieks. Now, as the baby windmilled its legs in my shaky grip, I no longer cared about winning any accolades from God; in fact, I was ready to tender my resignation as a Jew altogether. There had to be less savage religions out there. In that moment, Santeria seemed comparatively civilized.

  And at the precise moment the foreskin pandemonium had reached its apex—the mother was shielding her face and the father was screaming, “Put it back! Put it back!!”—the rabbi, with expert stoicism, reached for a small wad of gauze, dipped it in some cheap twist-cap kosher wine, then placed the wine-soaked gauze in the baby’s gaping, stretched mouth. In an incalculably small instant later, total silence. Those few drops of sugary hobo cabernet were enough to keep the baby pacified. Shit-faced drunk, and pacified. It was, in the parlance of synagogues, a miracle.

  I stood over the baby and marveled over his serene expression. It was as if he had no memory of the horror he’d just suffered. I, on the other hand, would not soon forget our brief time together. Minutes earlier, I had been eating an ice cream cone in the afternoon sun. Now, my T-shirt was soaked through with sweat, my hands were shaking, and I was wondering how I could get my hands on an entire roll of gauze, marinated overnight in Wild Turkey. Perhaps the baby somehow registered my duress because for a micromoment his brow wrinkled slightly, and then relaxed again. It was as if he were apologizing for causing me so much grief. And I thought, even though this was not a Jewish baby, maybe the act of circumcision imparted his first uniquely Jewish quality: guilt. It was positively adorable.

  Freaking

  By Jordan Carlos

  MICHAEL ROTH WAS A YOUNG JEWISH PRINCE. His family owned a line of elite department stores in Texas called Roth-Harris, which for a time even trumped its Dallas rival, Neiman Marcus. In other words, Michael had tasted and seen things I as a kid could only dream about—Europe, skiing, tropical beaches.

  Michael was a good kid but he was also a total spaz. In peewee league sports, he was always assigned positions where his spaziness could be reined in. In baseball, he played catcher: He never could catch a pitch but he wasn’t afraid to charge. In soccer he was a ruthless fullback, taking the scalps of third and fourth-grade forwards foolhardy enough to advance the ball beyond midfield.

  Michael was also one of the most popular kids in school. He had a cool older brother and sister who lorded over the high school and drove expensive foreign cars. His house was nestled in Preston Hollow, an exclusive neighborhood with well-manicured hedges, which was also home to another classmate, Amy Boone—a direct descendant of Daniel Boone, whose parents owned the neurotics’ pleasure garden, the Container Store. T.I. titan Ross Perot lived minutes away.

  The Roths’ postmodern pile sat across from a creek. You had to drive across a small cement bridge to get to it. I had looked through my parents’ book of Frank Lloyd Wright architecture and I was sure that the Roths lived in one of Wright’s creations. Mrs. Roth was beautiful. She had delicate, sinewy features, and was going gray gracefully. One of her front teeth had a slight crook, which gave her the most wonderful lisp. OK, she was a MILF.

  I know all this because one glorious day Michael invited me to spend the night at his house. Now, whenever I spent the night at a friend’s house, it always seemed to be the same horrible nightmare. My friend would become unhinged over some small thing his mother asked him to do, like put his Legos away, and he would lash out at her. I would shrink into the corner and hope for an end to the madness. My mom would have never tolerated such craziness in her house. My parents believed that order was far more important than the hide of one child. And Michael’s house was no different. He was a brat, used to getting his way.

  After that one evening at the Roths’, where we dined on gourmet food and I took a bath so hot it burned my brain, I never spent the night again. Michael and I sort of drifted apart. He was very popular after all and I just wasn’t. I see now that many of my sleepover invites had a lot to do with me being the only black kid in the class. I think the mothers were trying to broaden their young son’s horizons. I can just see the parents saying to one another, “We can’t not invite the black kid.” So I was hardly surprised when I was invited to Michael’s Bar Mitzvah, even though we hadn’t really hung out since we were kids.

  When I got the invitation, my older brother had been diligently studying men’s fashion in the pages of GQ magazine, and since I wanted to be like my big brot
her, I also kept myself abreast of all the sartorial dos and don’ts. Hence, I picked out my outfit for the Bar Mitzvah with great care—a tweed jacket I’d gotten for Easter, with a black Polo tie, hunter green Generra shirt, and of course my Bass boat shoes. I was rocking the Kanye West look, sans irony, at the tender age of 13.

  I dressed not only to impress the Roths but also Kate Mulvehill, a cute, Scotts-Irish new kid in school who had rich golden hair, freckles, an upturned nose and a lilting laugh that knocked her lovely chin skyward. I was smitten with her. Thoughts of her took up most of the space in my head. (This was before the days of medicating children, so my deluded longing was raw.) I was determined to have Kate, or at least to make all my longing disappear, and I thought Michael’s Bar Mitzvah was the night it was going to happen. She’d smiled and exchanged hellos with me when we walked into the synagogue, and she’d made a face at me during the service to express how boring and long the service had been. I was so in there!

  After the ceremony, crudités and drinks were served. Michael’s parents approached me and thanked me for coming. Then Mrs. Roth complimented me on my outfit and I blasted through the roof into fashion Valhalla. I’d gotten a compliment from the queen of the Roth-Harris Empire. I could die now.

  After cocktail hour, the kids all piled into three chartered party buses and I rode with quiet wonder at the depths of the Roth family’s riches. We were driven downtown to the West End Marketplace. Once a mess of abandoned warehouses, the West End had been converted into a shopping center complete with fancy restaurants and a Planet Hollywood. Could it get any cooler? Michael’s parents rented out an entire floor of the building. The raw loft space afforded great views of all the Dallas skyscrapers. There were amazing gourmet treats and all the soda and candy we could stuff into our grubby little mouths. It was shaping up to be the best night of my life.