Sex, Drugs & Gefilte Fish

by Shana Liebman

  The goat was rushed to the vet, and Petey was scolded for his behavior, “No, Petey! No eating live baby goats we got as gag gifts! Bad dog!” But it was no use. The blood of decorative farm animals on his muzzle was intoxicating. He wanted more. And he was about to be shamelessly indulged.

  The first thing you do when you move to a fake farm is to get some ducks, which can be purchased at a real farm. We started with three, one for each of us. We kept them in a little shed and we named them.

  But it wasn’t long before Petey found a way into the shed, got them each by the neck and shook them dead. So we went back to the real farm and bought more ducks, 10 of them, which the farmer bundled in twos and threes into burlap grain sacks and loaded into the back of our station wagon. This time we brought them down to the pond, where we thought they would be safer and have more freedom. They were as pretty as a picture on that pond, swimming around like ducks do, cutting swirly figures into the surface of the water. But Petey was a swimmer, a great swimmer, and one by one those ducks were hunted down and turned into little white feather storms on the water.

  We began to find them almost daily, on our front doorstep, with Petey beside them, eyes bright, shoulders high, grinning like the village idiot with a new pair of shoes.

  Another perfectly good duck would meet its final resting place—the big plastic trash can in the garage. What else were we supposed to do with them? It wasn’t like we were going to eat them. That would mean ripping out their feathers and chopping their heads off, and that’s just not the kind of thing that fake farm people do. We’re not savages.

  My dad tried to teach Petey not to kill the ducks. He would push his nose into the carcasses and say, “No! Bad dog!” He even went so far as to try and shame the dog out of killing, by tying a dead duck to him with a rope and making him walk around with it all day, which is a really disturbing thing for children to witness, but as far as Petey was concerned it was a reward, and he wore that duck like a medal, proud as the day is long, while at the same time enjoying the convenience of having his jaws free for more killing.

  I don’t remember how many times the ducks were replaced, but I remember the last time. I remember going to the real farm to get them, the whole family together on this particular day, and I remember watching the farmer stuff them into the grain sacks, 15 of them this time, packed in twos and threes, noisy, noisy ducks; piled into the back of the station wagon, flapping and honking and just going nuts back there. And all of us, uneasy about the grain sacks as usual, as we were about all the harsh realities of real farm things, but excited by it too, having ducks in burlap sacks like grain or any other cargo, like real farm people do, with all their calluses in the places where they need them. And those ducks just making the biggest racket you’ve ever heard, and all of us laughing about it. And then quieter, settling down now; and then quieter still. Then pulling up the driveway, opening the back of the station wagon, and it’s too quiet, too still, and then a wave of panic, realizing that things change and become more modern every minute, and how could that farmer not know it when it’s so everyday to pack up ducks in sacks, but then there’s always going to be that one day when things are suddenly different and everybody has their own reasons for not seeing.

  The sacks were made of plastic.

  We pulled and ripped at their knotted tops and started dumping ducks onto the driveway, some dead, some stumbling, half-flapping, gasping, long languid necks swaying like drunken snakes reaching for some hallucinated prey. And then my parents on the ground, together on their knees on the ground, massaging duck hearts and blowing into duck beaks, saying, “This one’s gone, hand me another,” but it was no use, and duck after duck quit struggling toward life and stiffened into the unyielding posture of the dead.

  And there we stood, stunned, embarrassed, distraught, silently observing the downy quilt of horror that lay at our feet, already dreading the inevitable heaping of a record 15 ducks into that trash can, when a kind of miracle happened: a tiny chest rising and falling. The extension of a wing. Back from the dead, as if by the hand of God, one little duck got to his feet, gave himself a good shake, and looked right at us, as if to say, “What?”

  We named him Lucky, and it was not without ceremony that we carried him down to the pond and released him and watched him swim out, cutting those pretty swirls into the black shining surface of the water, glossy white feathers shimmering like angel’s wings in the summer sun. Petey killed him later that afternoon.

  BODY & SOUL

  My Whole Hair Story

  By Todd Rosenberg

  I’M BALD. When it first started happening it freaked me out totally. I was 24 years old, living at home with my parents and managing a bookstore. I couldn’t believe my hair was falling out. I dug through old family albums and looked at my family history hair-wise. Great Uncle Schlomo? Bald! Cousin Sol? Bald! Grandpa Max? Bald! Bald baldy bald!

  Around this time, Hair Club for Men was running their late-night infomercials—practically on a loop. And like any shedding insomniac I watched this program over and over into the wee hours. I knew it backward and forward. The guy getting out of the pool. The guy in the convertible. The guy with the bikini chicks. The before (sad loser) and after (happy winner) photos. No problem they said! Wash and go they said! I finally went…

  When I walked into this cheesy place, I saw one of the guys from the actual commercial! The guy from the pool! I recognized him immediately. It was like seeing a minor celebrity! I was surprisingly thrilled. But then I started really looking at his hair. It looked terrible.

  Like this:

  Before I could put two and two together, this hot chick named Stephanie came out and brought me into this “consultation room.” Stephanie’s cleavage looked like this:

  Stephanie told me how important it was that I was doing this now. Because after I lost more hair people would “know.” Stephanie told me it was still early enough that people would never be able to tell. So I signed up and gave Stephanie my life savings of $3,500. Some lady took a hair sample and explained the process. Here’s how it works: They take your side hair (“strong hair”) and weave a very tight braid with it all around your head. The horseshoe part. And they cut hair on top of your head extra short.

  Then they take this mesh hairpiece and basically “anchor” it to your new side hair braid with fishing wire so it holds tight on top of your head. They tighten it down.

  After that they style it up and I was quickly realizing that it was more styled up than I ever styled up before. It took, like, an hour. Gelled, brushed, gooped, shaped, hair-sprayed and finally done.

  Stephanie told me how much better I looked. She said I looked amazing.

  Did I mention Stephanie’s cleavage looked like this?

  I left in a daze and drove home almost crashing my car while checking my new look in the rearview mirror every two seconds. I walked in the door and shamefully showed my parents what I’d done. They were like, “Umm… If that’s what makes you happy… We want you to be happy.” I didn’t feel happy.

  I went to sleep that night and remember feeling strange because I didn’t feel naked when I was totally naked. I kept touching my new hair. Gently pulling at it. I couldn’t sleep. It itched. I wasn’t naked anymore.

  I woke up around 4 a.m. to get a jump start on my new hair before work. (I had to open the store at 9 a.m. and it was 10 minutes away. It was a big day at the bookstore that day because we were starting the move to a new location and the big boss was going to be there.)

  My first day of wash and go! I took a shower and put all the shampoo and goop in it then tried to style my hair with the gel. The wash worked but the go wasn’t going. I started panicking. The hair looked nothing like it looked the day before! It wasn’t 90210! It was this big matted tangled mess! Attached to my head! I couldn’t get a comb through it! I couldn’t make it look normal in any way! It was like a hair sculpture. It was so thick!

  I kept adding more gel thinking that would help. It m
ade things worse. It wouldn’t dry. And eventually the obvious hit me—if I feel self-conscious about my thinning natural hair, I was going to feel 10 times more self-conscious about this crazy thing on my head!

  I woke up my parents crying (I was 24) and told them how I had made a terrible mistake and I needed this thing off of my head immediately!! Problem was it was seriously totally attached to my head! I couldn’t get it off and I had to go to work!

  My dad and I got out the scissors and we cut the whole braid off. It was the only way. It was humiliating. I cried through it. When it was finally off, I had this weird no-hair hairline around the side of my head where the braid was—and it was cut really short on top but still kind of long on the sides. My “haircut” was bizarre.

  But I went to work that day with a smile. The crazy anxiety panic was about completely gone. I actually felt good about my newly horribled hair. I knew I’d done what I could do to fix the problem and now I was free! Coworkers asked what happened and I told them I was drunk and my friends screwed with me.

  Anyway, to this day that was the best $3,500 I ever spent because I learned such an amazing lesson from it. I knew there was nothing more I could do about what was happening—so I just let it go. If I had kept that hairpiece on I just wouldn’t have been me. And I like this me.

  Half and Half

  By Raven Snook

  WHEN I WAS ABOUT 5 my parents sat me down and explained that I was half Christian and half Jewish. My father had been raised as a Christian Scientist and my mother had been brought up a Brooklyn Jew, and even though neither of them practiced anymore, they wanted me to understand my heritage, that I was half and half.

  Now, I was a very literal child so I decided that my right side was Christian and my left side was Jewish. This imaginary divide was emphasized even more when I sprouted a tiny pointy growth on the left side of my head. The doctor said that it was just a benign tumor, but I knew better. Jennifer—the most popular girl in my kindergarten class because she wore all-purple all the time—had told me that all Jews had horns. Since I was only half Jewish, it made sense that I only had one on my left side.

  As I grew up, I was obsessed with keeping both of my sides in balance. I didn’t want one side to outweigh the other. My Christian side already seemingly had the advantage in that I was right-handed. So I wanted to make sure my Jewish side never felt left out.

  This was really hard because my parents opted to send me to a grammar school at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. It wasn’t as Christian as it sounds. This was the ’70s so the school was very multi-cultie, hippie-dippy, embracing all creeds, colors and confusions, so I fit right in. The pastor was even cool when I told him that even though I was willing to go to chapel once a week, only the right side of my body would be participating. When I recited the Lord’s Prayer I looked like Billy Idol singing “Rebel Yell.”

  While the pastor was understanding, my fellow classmates weren’t, and after a couple of weeks I realized I was going to have to talk through both sides of my mouth if I was going to make it through school without a perpetual wedgie. After a couple years at Cathedral—not to mention a lifetime in our predominantly Christian culture—it became clear that my Christian side was beating the crap out of my Jewish side.

  So in fifth grade I asked my mom to send me to Hebrew school. This was a really tough transition for me. Every day I would leave the beautiful gothic arches of St. John the Divine to go to the claustrophobic yellow brick walls of the SAJ Reconstructionist synagogue. The rabbi, Allan Miller, didn’t seem to believe in God, and throughout every service, he would try to convince us of that too, just so he could have atheistic company. Every time the cantor finished davening, Rabbi Miller would read a section of the Torah and then deconstruct it as if it were a Thomas Pynchon novel. Then he’d end the service by singing “Adon Olam” to the tune of “Rock Around the Clock.”

  Despite my best efforts to find religious equilibrium, I remained pretty imbalanced until I got to ninth grade and went to my first secular school, the High School of the Performing Arts (yes, the Fame school). It was there that I found God, or specifically, Jesus. I wore all-black clothes. I dyed my hair jet black and I started to collect crucifixes. Big ones. Which I wore right between my tits. Even though my mother had no problem sending me to a school that had the words cathedral and church in its name, my crosses were more than she could bear. She pleaded, she prodded, she grounded, she threatened, she even bought me a rhinestone-encrusted Jewish star—and trust me, those are hard to find—hoping I’d trade my crosses for a shimmering Star of David. But I was like, “Um, sparkly Jewish star over a dead guy on a cross bleeding profusely? I don’t think so!” The best my mom could do was guilt me into not wearing crosses during my Bat Mitzvah—after which I promptly quit synagogue.

  Around the same time I more or less quit school. I was too busy hanging out at places like the Peppermint Lounge and the Pyramid Club to be bothered with academics. Suddenly crosses were no longer my mother’s main concern. My 20-year-old Aryan-looking boyfriend, who was in the Navy and liked to deal heroin on the side, was. She knew she had to do something drastic to get me to change my ways. So the summer after I failed all my ninth-grade classes, she announced that she had accepted a job transfer and that we were moving… to Paris.

  As if I didn’t have enough issues being a Jew already, she moved me to France, a block from Notre Dame, a structure so stunning it could seduce anyone into converting! After school and on weekends, I would get stoned, go into this gorgeous cathedral and watch the colors in the stained glass windows kind of like… go together.

  I attended the American High School of Paris, where I did my arty Goth thing. I was in choir, and after a couple of weeks the director, Mrs. Pruitt, came up to me and asked if I wanted to join the choir at the American Cathedral in Paris where she was the conductor. “I know you’re half Jewish,” she said. Apparently my mother had made sure everyone knew. “You won’t have to participate in the religious service if you don’t want to. You can just come in on Sunday mornings and sing hymns. You have a lovely voice.”

  I don’t know if I just wanted to piss off my mom even more, or if I truly wanted to sing, or maybe I wanted to go to that dark side, my Christian side, just a little bit more, but I said, “Sure.” That next Sunday, when any self-respecting Goth would be asleep, I got up, put on my crosses (hey, it was the right place to wear them!) and went to the American Cathedral in Paris.

  Mrs. Pruitt introduced me to the rest of the choir, a combination of congregation members and ringers: professional singers hired to give glory to God on key. We quickly sang through the morning’s hymns, donned billowy black gowns and headed upstairs.

  “Now, I know you’re not that familiar with church,” Mrs. Pruitt said. Little did she know. “Just follow Kathy, the woman on your right. Whatever she does, you do it too.”

  We sang a hymn as we walked down the aisle and filed into the pews as the priest began the service. He preached. He prodded. He pleaded. He guilted. He sounded like my mother. I tuned him out and soon I had lost track of what was going on.

  Suddenly Kathy got up, so I jumped up alongside her. She exited the pew. I exited too. She started heading up the steps toward the altar. I followed. Then she knelt down. That’s when I realized I had fucked up.

  The priest stopped in front of me and dangled the wafer in front of my face. “Oy vey,” I whispered, as the priest gave me the Sacrament, after which I took a really big swig of that awful cheap red wine. But in that moment, as I consumed the body and blood of Christ, it hit me: It didn’t matter that I was technically half and half. In my body and in my blood and in my soul, I felt 100 percent Jew.

  To this day, I always feel a swell of Semitic pride whenever I pass a Catholic church. Thanks to their Communion I was finally made whole.

  Weight Watchers at Gunpoint

  By Wendy Shanker

  I FINALLY STOPPED DIETING a couple of years ago. Now I feel quite content with m
y juicy, Jewish, curvy (a.k.a. “voluptuous” on JDate) bod. But back in the day, I tried every diet there is, from South Beach to the hot-dogs-and-vanilla-ice-cream diet (oh yeah, it exists) to Jenny Craig. And I spent a mad amount of money at Weight Watchers.

  Although Weight Watchers constantly changes their language—for example, WW is no longer a “diet” but a “flexible food plan”—the gist of the thing doesn’t change. Stop eating. Start moving. Lose weight. The clientele is mostly women wearing their 12s and 14s over their Spanx, who’ve been told their whole lives that they’re “big-boned.” There’s always one Midwestern 300-pound woman at the weekly meetings, there with her equally large mom. They’ll both end up on the “Half Their Size!” cover of People magazine. And of course, there’s always one overweight guy who will lose 60 pounds in about three weeks. Damn you and your male metabolism.

  The Weight Watchers leaders are truly inspiring people who’ve somehow followed the plan and made it a lifestyle. Most have reached their goal weights and maintained them. Except this one guy who used to lead the group I went to in downtown Manhattan, who hadn’t seen his goal weight for at least 25 or 30 pounds. He used to tell us, “When we talk about one bread, we mean half a Lender’s Bagel. Not a bagel store bagel, like a Pick-A-Bagel. You know the big ones that weigh about half a pound? Hmm, I love me an everything bagel at Pick-A-Bagel. Toasted, with veggie cream cheese…” He always left me hankering for a bagel with a schmear.