Sex, Drugs & Gefilte Fish

by Shana Liebman

  As I saw it, I had cultivated my relationship with Kate since the fifth grade, and now the moment had come to step it up and go steady. I’d waited and waited for the right moment. Unfortunately I’d waited too long. Just as I was about to make my move, my friends informed me that some of Michael’s New York cousins were dancing with Kate. I took off like a shot for the dance floor, where I was in for the shock of my young life. Kate and another girl, Amy Moye, were surrounded by Michael’s four cousins. And they were freaking.

  For anyone who doesn’t remember, freaking is a ridiculous dance from the ’90s: The man leans back, crotch aimed at his dance partner, knees bent and one hand raised toward the sky. With his female partner straddled between his legs, the man makes a bridge with his other arm, so that he has three points of contact with the floor. In short, freaking looks like the MTV Grind’s version of the bridge yoga position.

  So the boys were freaking Kate and Amy, who were dancing in total ecstasy. I watched in horror. On top of the ridiculous moves, these boys’ fashion was atrocious—genie pants with patent leather shoes and steel toe tips, vests and rayon shirts, with Looney Tunes ties. Stuff like this just wasn’t done in Texas… at least for another couple of years. I wanted to run over and break up the junior high orgy, to grab these gate-crashing Yankees by their scruff and toss them out of the party, but instead I found a dark corner and remained there until it was time to go home.

  The next morning my father drove me and my friend David up to the mountains near Norman, Oklahoma, for what was left of a Boy Scout camping trip. David and I had missed the first night of the trip on account of Michael’s party. We drove in total silence. I felt like I’d been hit in the back of the head with a frozen sledgehammer. My father, as always, was playing the Four Tops’ “Baby I Need Your Lovin’,” in his impractical rear-loading CD player.

  I actually listened to the words for the first time that day. When my dad tried to eject the disc after the sixth repeat, I begged him not to. Those lyrics were speaking to me.

  One Night at Gimbels

  By Rena Zager

  AT SUMMER CAMP, I BECAME GOOD FRIENDS with Maggie, a violin player, who lived near me in the suburbs of Philly. We’d do fun stuff together like play flute and violin duets. But soon duets just weren’t enough for us. We wanted adventure. So we decided to sleep in Gimbels department store. It was to be a suburban homage to the best book ever written, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, about a brother and sister who hide out in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  A big part of our planning was about all the candy we would eat when we were there (We were very adamant that we wouldn’t steal it. We planned on leaving money on the counter.) because neither one of us was allowed candy at home. My candy situation was dire. Before AIDS the terrible disease, there was AYDS the diet supplement, which my sister and I would eat just to get a taste of chocolate. At Maggie’s house, it was even worse. Her mother made her own bread and she wanted you to conserve water by not flushing the toilet when you peed, so, you know, candy was a very exciting concept for both of us.

  To prepare for the stay, we cased Gimbels like two detectives. We found out where the sprinkler system was, where the fire alarms were and what was on each floor. We discovered the greatest hideout… two display beds next to each other with plenty of room underneath. We were all set to go except for the fact that we had no way of getting there—we couldn’t drive.

  Maggie suggested her mom, a psychiatrist who was raising Maggie by herself, might be willing to take us. That might sound weird, but her mom was that kind of woman—bohemian, intellectual, open to new ideas including aiding and abetting her daughter in a little trespassing. She was everything my mother was not, which is why I adored her. I loved going over to their house. I admired how dusty it was and I especially liked that there was a gray metal filing cabinet in their living room. A filing cabinet in the living room? That was mind-blowing. You couldn’t sit in my living room—you could get smacked for even looking at it. So a filing cabinet with dust was very impressive.

  Maggie’s mom agreed to be an accomplice but there were ground rules: We had to keep a journal of our thoughts and feelings, which she wanted to read afterward. We were like, uh, OK, sure, whatever, “I’m scared. Blah blah blah,” just drive us there. Also, we had to be out of the store within five minutes of it opening the next day because she had a doctor’s appointment and she told us that if we were not out within five minutes she would leave us there. Then this piece of advice: If you get caught, tell them you’re reporters from Kids World. Kids World was one of those Saturday afternoon TV shows “for kids, by kids.” I hated the prissy kids on Kids World, but I thought it was a brilliant idea to say we were from Kids World because Maggie’s mother was brilliant so how could it not be? If you took half a second to think about it though it made no sense. What would two Kids World reporters be doing in Northeast Philly… in the middle of the night… illegally hanging around a department store?

  That night, my dad drove me over to Maggie’s house. “What are you guys doing tonight?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Playing duets?”

  Instead, her mother bought us bagels and drove us to Gimbels, wished us good luck and took off. We found the display beds, crawled underneath them and waited for the store to close. Soon after hearing “Gimbels will be closing in five minutes,” the Muzak was shut off, but it made the sound—now antiquated—you’d hear when you’d turn off a record player without removing the needle first. It groaned itself down to silence. Then the lights went off. Then the heat went off… and then my head started throbbing. Since we had agreed to wait an hour after the store closed to speak to each other, all I could do was lie there listening to my temples pounding, silently screaming in my head: What was I thinking? This is the dumbest idea ever! Why is my head throbbing? Is this what a migraine feels like?

  The night was terrifying and boring at the same time. (Orson Welles said that about flying once.) The whole place was dark and the mannequins were casting shadows like crazy and it was vast and empty and spooky. The candy raid was definitely off. We were so scared we couldn’t even move. We finally got up the nerve to sit on the floor outside our beds, shivering and talking. The big adventure of the night was when we had to go to the bathroom. It might have been the first time I was in a men’s bathroom—the women’s was locked—and it was filled with graffitti so we thought it would be OK to write our names on the wall. (We were timid scofflaws.) We spent the night gossiping about who was a bitch, who was cute, regular girl talk—except we had to kill hours and hours and hours and we were too scared to sleep and our food had run out and there was no heat on. We made feeble entries in our journals. I think I wrote, “I’m scared” a couple of times.

  Around six in the morning, we saw a security guard walking toward us with a guard dog and we dove underneath our beds. Another close call was when I peeked my head out just before the store opened and there was a cashier counting money about two feet from me, but she didn’t see me. At 10:05 a.m., we rolled out from underneath the beds and walked down the escalator while people poured into the store. Maggie’s mom was waiting for us in the getaway car and we got in and she sped away.

  A week later, my mother was reading the local paper and over her shoulder, I saw the headline TWO GIRLS FOUND IN GIMBELS. I screamed and tore the paper out of my mother’s hands. She had no idea why I was yelling and carrying on but I guess she was used to me screaming for no reason. The story wasn’t about us. The same night we did it, two other girls were found hiding out in another Gimbels, but they were normal teenagers—they were there to steal clothes—so they got arrested and charged with trespassing.

  At school, I bragged about what I had done. And then all these kids started saying that they had done it too. That really pissed me off. First of all, you’re losers for copying me, get your own adventure. Second, I didn’t believe them. One day, this girl Marianne came up to me all nonchalantly: “Last Friday
night, I spent the night in Wanamaker’s.” She said it way too coolly for it to be true. I knew the hard, worried look of someone who had spent the night in a department store. She definitely didn’t have it.

  The True Meaning of Christmas

  By Byron Kerman

  I WAS A SOPHOMORE IN COLLEGE and I decided that it would be a good idea to explore a new city during Christmas break. Hanging out with 250 other Jews at a T.G.I. Friday’s over the holidays, which is some sort of weird St. Louis tradition, had become tiresome.

  At the time, I had three not-anywhere-close-to-being girlfriends: Kira, Sarah and Catherine, who, I realized, were all from Atlanta. So I decided to drive the 14 hours from Chicago to Atlanta to hang out with them over the holidays. Each one had a house with a place for me to sleep. It seemed like a good plan. Unfortunately, I didn’t really plan. I just sort of said, well, there are three of you who are each willing to put me up, so let’s just play it by ear.

  I drove down with Catherine, and it was a challenge to keep the bong loaded and lit for the entire 14 hours, but we did our best. Because we were slackers, we didn’t actually leave for the drive until 6 p.m., so we drove all night long.

  When we arrived in Atlanta, we drove to a house shared by the members of a rock band. Catherine was their groupie—I mean manager. When we got there, a guy came out on the front porch.

  “Are you Byron?”

  “Yeah. You’re Geoff, right?” I was excited to meet some new friends.

  “Yeah. Listen, you need to call your mother and the Georgia State Police.”

  As usual, my mom had gotten worried and been waking up people throughout the South and along the Eastern Seaboard asking if they’d seen me alive.

  Catherine and I had a good time for about two days, hanging out with the rock band, watching them practice, farting around in Atlanta, going to the record stores and bookstores, the Little Five Points area, and so on. And then Catherine sprung something on me. She was a bit of a flake, and she said, “Listen, Byron, I didn’t tell you this before, but I gotta leave town with my mom. We’re going on a little mother-daughter Christmas vacation of our own.”

  So, I just said OK and figured it was time to call Kira and Sarah to see who I would be staying with next. Sarah’s mom answered her phone, and said, “Well, listen, Sarah is in Poland and Germany on one of those concentration camp trips.” Oh joy.

  So I called Kira who told me, “Sorry, my mom gave up our guest room to one of my cousins.”

  I had no place to stay. I had 12 days left of a 14-day trip, I had no place to stay in Atlanta and I had no friends here.

  So I went to the rock band and said, “Guys, listen, I know we don’t know each other very well, but can I sleep on your couch for the next two weeks or so?” And they said OK. They had their own Christmas obligations to attend to.

  Over those two weeks, I did this thing that only slackers can do, and it’s kind of an achievement. What you do is you wake up at 10 in the morning, and then you wake up the next day at noon, and you wake up the next day at 2 p.m., and you wake up the next day at 4 p.m., and you can do the whole circle if you’re really good. It seemed hopeless, but I just kept on going.

  Some days I would tell myself that I had to get up before noon, get a bus schedule, find out where the art museums or something like that were in this town, go there, have a good time and stop moping. But somehow, inertia got the better of me, and I did just about nothing except sleep on that leather couch in the band house for pretty much the entire remainder of the trip.

  Ten days went by like that, and pretty soon it was Christmas Eve. I didn’t even know what day it was when I woke up. For a lot of us, the whole Christmas thing can float by with just a mild sense of awareness—or resentment. I walked down the street from the house where I was staying, and all of a sudden there was a bar that I had somehow overlooked before.

  I went inside, got a drink and sat down to read the newspaper. There were about six other people there. That, I figured out from looking at the date on the newspaper, had to be because it was Christmas Eve.

  Then from the corner of my vision a hand slapped the table, my table. And where the hand was, there were now four quarters. I looked up and it was the bartender. “Why don’t you pick some songs out on the jukebox?”

  Now, as far as I know, I am not a pretty girl, but I just said thanks, and picked out some songs on the jukebox. Then this couple, a guy in a cowboy hat and his blonde girlfriend, came over and asked me what I was drinking.

  I was sort of buzzed at this point and I kept thinking: This is the best time I have ever had in a bar! People are buying me songs on the jukebox. People are buying me drinks. It’s fantastic.

  Most importantly, it was a huge relief. I had just suffered for 12 days with no friends but now people were taking pity on me—because I was alone in a bar on Christmas Eve. I decided not to tell anyone I was Jewish. I was having too much fun. I actually had people to talk to!

  I talked, I drank, I had a good time and I went home for the first time in more than a week feeling good that my Atlanta vacation had, for a while at least, become something instead of a big nothing.

  I told myself that I had just experienced some of that Christmas spirit—the true meaning of Christmas. Reaching out to the widow, the orphan and the stranger, or in this case, the lonely Jew. That’s what it’s all about. And it felt good.

  But you know what? The next morning, I had a much, much bigger epiphany—one that has stayed with me to this day. Why should there be a season or a week or a day dedicated to actually giving a shit about your fellow man? How about every fucking day?

  Yes, Christmas worked for me that year, but why should anyone in real pain put stock in a special time of year when people are guilted into being nice to others? I’m sorry, but I think that’s some kind of cosmic joke—even funnier than a man in a Santa suit singing Christmas carols while pissing in an alley. And I finally got it on Christmas Day.

  Now, the Jews have some pretty funny holidays. We’ve got one where we make a shack out of fruits and vegetables and we juggle lemons inside of it. We have another holiday where we leave little drops of red wine on a white plate to commemorate the 10 plagues of ancient Egypt. It’s very Macbeth. But what we don’t have is a holiday where we pretend for even a second that this world runs on kindness. Thank God.

  Poop Sandwich

  By Abby Sher

  THERE WAS THE TIME I GAVE a poop sandwich to my rabbi. It was at the confirmation class picnic in my backyard and I was 16 years old—old enough to know it wasn’t funny. But I thought he would understand. I thought we had connected on some level, in some corner of our minds that no one else knew about. I thought we had seen each other’s soul.

  Rabbi Sirkman came to our synagogue the fall I turned 15. He looked like Scooter from the Muppets and he had a thick Boston accent and a beautiful pregnant wife named Susan. I hadn’t been to temple much since my Bat Mitzvah two years before, but my mom brought me one Saturday morning to hear the new rabbi give a sermon. After services she made me shake his hand and introduce myself. Rabbi Sirkman’s eyes were a warm chocolate brown and he told me he was so glad to see me there. He was starting a confirmation class for high school students to continue their studies after Bar/Bat Mitzvah and he wanted to know if I would be interested. My mom said that, yes, I would be very interested. Great, he’d see me next Tuesday night for a get-to-know-you pizza dinner.

  By Monday, word had spread about the new confirmation class. Sara M. announced in gym class that she was going. Jim C. and Andy said they were too. David K. said it sounded boring and Craig said he wouldn’t be caught dead there, but the next time I saw him was Tuesday night in the synagogue cafeteria with a piece of pizza and an Orange Crush. David K. was there too. Everyone was allowed to have two slices of pizza and we were each given a folder with a cartoon man on the cover. The man had huge eyes and a big cowlick. His name was Mr. Foof, explained Rabbi Sirkman, and Mr. Foof was going to help us in our
exploration. For the next two years, we were going to read Jewish philosophers and theologists and dissect ancient and contemporary texts, hopefully arriving at our own understanding of what it means to be a Jewish adult. He asked us that first night to define God. I squirmed in my seat. David K. said He was an old man in a blue terry cloth robe with a big G on it. Tara D. said she didn’t think there was a God. Rabbi Sirkman said they were both right.

  Each week we started with pizza and soda, standing sullenly in our proscribed circles. But once we entered the library, the world changed. We analyzed Martin Buber and the concepts of I-Thou and I-It relationships. We read aloud from our books about human passions and the true nature of virtue. Rabbi Sirkman challenged us each to identify our place in the world and to think of our religion not as a finite set of rules but as a course of open dialogue. He asked us questions about the state of Israel and who had a right to the land. We debated the feasibility of Jewish-Arab reconciliation and tried to decipher where the conflict began. He told us there was no excuse for us not reading the newspaper, and one night he refused to speak until we told him why we were at war in Iraq. We weren’t being graded. There were no tests. But somehow it became important to us to show up in the temple library every Tuesday night and know what we were saying—to know ourselves in the context of history.

  I didn’t know how to thank Rabbi Sirkman for taking us out from under the high school overpass and bringing us into some place completely unknown. And I didn’t know how to tell him that I wanted to spend every Tuesday night for the rest of my life with him. As our confirmation got closer, I had more and more trouble looking him in the eye. My teeth felt too big for my mouth when I tried to talk in class and I felt like I was going to cry on the carpool ride home. I didn’t tell anyone about my feelings. I didn’t know how to explain how much I adored him. How much I yearned for his wide smile, or a wink from behind his wire-rimmed glasses. When my mom suggested we throw a graduation party for the confirmation class, I was thrilled with the idea of having Rabbi Sirkman in my house.