Sex, Drugs & Gefilte Fish

by Shana Liebman

  Arabs are so weird. No wonder no one gets us.

  But I guess my name sort of fits because I do have enormous eyes—and they’re bigger than they’re meant to be because I have another totally Arab thing going on: huge dark circles. Whenever I go out without concealer, I look like I have pneumonia. Every single time I venture out of my house without makeup, I run into someone who gives me a “poor thing” sort of look and then asks, “What’s wrong?? Are you sick? Have you been crying?” and so I say, “No… this is what I look like without makeup.” And the person is then usually totally startled and they don’t know what to say and they give me this weird look like they’re thinking, “Oh that’s some weird ethnic thing I don’t understand.” So most of the time I just pretend I have a disease.

  Or I pretend to be Jewish, because with my big features and black hair, I kind of look like a lot of my Jewish friends. Plus, who didn’t want a Bat Mitzvah? All my friends were getting thousands of dollars in cash and prizes and loads of attention. Of course I wanted to be one of them. Unfortunately though, being Palestinian and all, I couldn’t totally fake it. When I was in first grade, I remember sitting in the back of the car with my brother—my dad was driving us somewhere, and I started happily singing my favorite Christmas carol: “Noel, noel, noel, noel, born is the king of Isra—”

  My brother smacked me.

  “Owwwwwwwwww… why’d you hit me?”

  “Because, Naj,” he said. “You’re supposed to say ‘born is the king of Occupied Palestine.’ ”

  Oh Jesus.

  Finding My Kegel Muscles

  By Stephen Glass

  IT HAS BEEN A LONG TIME since I have discovered a new part of my anatomy.

  Just last month, I thought my body was a lot like Earth, all mapped out. Indeed, I remember the very last portion of my body to be designated, a sliver of flesh, a small unlikely parcel, so tucked away between this and that, I did not know it—like the Kingdom of Monaco—had been deemed an independent land of its own. But this is not a story about that dark, nether region.

  This is a story of a different secret geography.

  Having recently moved to Los Angeles from New York, I decided to try to get into this Southern California living and get in better touch with my body.

  I called my mother and told her of my plan.

  “For my birthday, I’m going to get back into shape,” I said.

  “What do you mean back into shape?” she laughed. “You’ve never been in shape in your life. There’s nothing to get back to.”

  My mother had a point.

  The only focused effort I ever made at a gym was in the early 1980s when my mom signed me up for break-dancing lessons at the aerobics center she attended in the Chicago suburb where we lived.

  Each Saturday for several months, African-American men and women were bussed in from Chicago to teach a few dozen junior high students—including me and an overweight girl whom the jocks called The Purple Cow—how to moonwalk, headspin and windmill.

  After class one day, one of the African-American guys took me aside.

  “You’re being dissed,” he told me.

  I thought I knew what the word dis meant, but was not completely certain. At that time, my understanding of African-American expressions was limited to the poorly dubbed Eddie Murphy cassettes I had been illicitly passed at Camp Menominee.

  “She’s better than you,” the break-dancer explained, pointing to The Purple Cow.

  I never returned.

  So, as you can see, my need, 21 years later, to prove that I could do something physical, anything physical, was desperate.

  I signed up for Pilates lessons at a studio near my Silverlake home.

  Pilates, I found out, even more so than yoga, is still overwhelmingly practiced by women. In fact, I was the only male in the studio and so right away I asked my instructor, Liza * , whether this was an acceptable exercise for men.

  “It’s great for men,” Liza reassured me. “Josef Pilates was a man and he was the greatest Pilates practitioner of them all.”

  Liza told me that she had been a dancer before she was a Pilates instructor. She named several dance companies she had been a member of and appeared hurt when I hadn’t heard of any of them.

  “I worked at Jumbo’s too,” she said, naming the strip club on Hollywood Boulevard. “You’ve definitely been there.”

  I hadn’t, but I pretended to have been. If not knowing any of her dance companies had hurt, I figured not knowing her strip club would have been devastating—to have revealed so much of herself and to go so unrecognized. It’s probably what a porn star feels like when she gets a bad review.

  Liza put me through the classic Pilates paces. She taught me the Hundreds and we worked on the Reformer. But it was during the Series of Five, a set of stretches, that things between us unraveled.

  “Do you know what kegel muscles are?” she asked me while my hands and legs were waving wildly, as if I were drowning.

  “Yes,” I squeaked out, although I had no idea why she was raising the female sex muscle.

  “Your kegel muscles are your problem,” Liza said. “You need to squeeze your kegel muscles when you do these exercises.”

  “I don’t have kegel muscles,” I said.

  I thought this was obvious. Women have told me that they perform kegel exercises in order to have better orgasms. So I’ve always assumed that the kegel muscle resides inside the vagina. I don’t have a vagina. Ergo, I do not have kegel muscles.

  That was the logic I had been living with for decades.

  “Of course you have kegel muscles,” Liza replied.

  I should have pleaded ignorance here. No one has ever told me that I don’t have kegel muscles. They’ve only told me that women do.

  In school, boys and girls were often separated during health class. I assumed that this was so the teachers could talk to the girls about their embarrassing things, like tampons and kegel muscles, and talk to us boys about our embarrassing things, which I’m still too embarrassed to mention here. But maybe for the girls it was just about tampons. And maybe the presence of kegel muscles was so obvious to everyone but me, that they went unmentioned.

  Or is it kegel muscle in the singular? I don’t even know how many a person can have.

  I also read men’s magazines, from which I have learned all kinds of things. But never has there been a mention of a male kegel muscle. You would think that if men had a kegel muscle we’d be developing it, making it bigger, stronger. We have the technology; where’s the Six Million Dollar Man kegel muscle?

  Further damning evidence against the male kegel muscle: My parents never spoke of it over dinner. For my father and mother—a doctor and a nurse, both Jewish and without shonda—no anatomical feature was off limits at dinner. Indeed, this was the very purpose of dinner. My brother and I would talk about school. My parents would talk about body parts. We talked about penises, testicles, nipples and uteri. But never the kegel muscle.

  But here’s the best evidence against the male kegel muscle: I don’t receive spam about it. If it were inside of me, I’m sure I would get 10 e-mails a day.

  Thus I proclaimed with great confidence, to Liza, a former stripper and Pilates instructor, who had probably seen more of the human anatomy than my father, a gastroenterologist for 25 years: “Men do not have kegel muscles!”

  “After more lessons, you’ll understand your body more and then you’ll feel your kegel muscle,” Liza explained. “So do you want our eight-class introductory special?”

  This Pilates thing was starting to sound like a cult to me: We’ll show you the wonders of the male kegel muscle and other secrets of the universe, but only if you spend more money. Sign here.

  Having previously been deceived about the human body (a Hebrew-school teacher convinced us boys that we had one more rib than our female classmates because that’s how Eve was born from Adam), I was determined not to be fooled again.

  I told Liza that I had to ascertain wheth
er I even had a kegel muscle before I paid her to find it.

  In my car, on the way home from the studio, I called Ask Me Now. You may have read about this service. You call a phone number and leave a message with any question. The message is transmitted to an office building (read: probable sweatshop) in the Philippines where it is researched, and minutes later, your cell phone is text messaged with the answer.

  “Do I have kegel muscles?” I asked an anonymous Filipino. “And if so where are they? By the way I’m a man.”

  Ah, the joy of globalization.

  A minute later my cell phone buzzed. The answer had come back: “Due to our editorial policy, we are unable to answer certain types of questions.”

  Julie, my girlfriend, was home when I returned from Pilates.

  “Do I have kegel muscles?” I demanded of her when I walked in the door.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not a doctor.”

  “Then how do you know you have them?”

  “I’m flexing them right now,” she said.

  That wasn’t helpful. I couldn’t see Julie doing anything. For all I know, the kegel muscle is just a fiction invented by a vast female conspiracy and, of course, Dr. Arnold Kegel. (Was he as good at flexing his muscle as Pilates was at his stretches?)

  “You can exercise it by stopping your pee suddenly,” Julie said.

  That sounded like torture.

  I Googled “kegel muscles” and found the KegelMaster 2000.

  It looked like a pair of hinged salad tongs you insert inside of yourself and open and close.

  “Don’t suffer needlessly. Try the KegelMaster. The World’s First Progressive Resistance Vaginal Exerciser. You owe it to yourself.”

  I do?

  I called the 1-800 number.

  “Kegelmaster, how can I help you?” a woman answered. She had a slight Southern accent.

  “Do men have kegel muscles?” I asked.

  “I’ve heard that they do, but I wouldn’t be an authority on that.”

  “Well, will your device help me?”

  “I can’t imagine it will.”

  “Is that because I don’t have a vagina?” I demanded to know. (My worldview was already blown apart. I wanted at least this to be clear.)

  “That’s right,” she said.

  “Is there anything I can do for my kegel muscles?” I asked.

  “I’ve heard stories,” she said.

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Like sometimes men hang a towel…”

  She then went silent.

  “They hang a towel?”

  “Yeah,” she said, but she would not elaborate.

  In the end, and after I had calmed down, I called Liza and signed up for those eight introductory Pilates sessions. I decided the male kegel muscle is a lot like the female G-spot: It’s better to search and to hope, even when it seems to be against all odds.

  And it sure beats hanging a towel.

  Body Hair

  By Annette Ezekial Kogan

  AFTER YEARS OF EXPERIMENTING with all sorts of contraptions and chemicals, suffering voluntarily at my own hands as well as those of others, I have arrived at the calculation that 30 percent of my life has been spent removing hair.

  Wax, bleach, razors, electrolysis, depilatory creams. I have developed a process as efficient and streamlined as possible for someone of my—let’s call it exotic—coloring. Family photo albums illustrate all too clearly the different stages of my search and struggle to find the ideal brow line—from their untamed wild days at my Bat Mitzvah, to their overplucked anemia at college graduation. I keep a magnifying mirror hidden in the drawer of my desk. When I return home from a trip, no matter how brief, I rush immediately to the mirror so I can examine how far my brows have strayed in the course of my absence. I can occasionally lose myself in a plucking binge. I could write a dissertation on the advantages of the round-edged tweezers.

  At a recent dinner party, the conversation turned to dictatorship and the central role the mustache plays in any cult of personality. Hitler, Stalin, Tito, Enver Hoxha. My heart was suddenly racing as I stared down at my plate, avoided eye contact and furtively raised my hand to cover my upper lip—which was of course impeccably smooth. I’ve come a long way from the days on the school playground when someone (a boy, generally) would suddenly stop whatever he was doing and stare at my face. “Hey,” he would blurt out, pointing at me as I talked faster and faster about Mr. Driscoll the gym teacher’s droopy sweatpants. “Hey—you’ve got a mustache!”

  Since then there’s been a lifetime of waxing. I don’t go to the fancy places, the so-called urban spas where they light candles, play mood music and lather you up in expensive lotions—a rather comical prelude to ripping out the hair from your most sensitive and delicate areas. Instead, I frequent the narrow storefront tucked between the newspaper stand and the fish store. It has a neon sign in the window blinking the word NAILS, with half the letter A missing.

  The place conforms perfectly to my slightly shameful feelings about the whole procedure, and I enter furtively, as if ducking into a triple-X movie theater in the middle of the afternoon. When the “girls”—immigrants so recent they can barely say hello in English—ask what I want, I mutter as quietly as possible, “Bikini wax.” The madam of the place points to one of the girls, and I follow her dutifully yet stealthily upstairs. In the tiny closet of a room, with only a doctor’s bench covered in crinkly paper and a makeshift stove keeping the pot of wax warm, the girl doesn’t even bother to step out while I undress. Instead, she stands behind me, arms folded, and watches as I remove my shoes, socks and pants and hoist myself up on the table. Tact not being these girls’ strong point, they usually take one look at my inner thighs and let out a heavily accented “Oh my God!”

  “Sorry,” I answer in total sympathy, wishing I could pat the poor thing on the shoulder without seeming condescending. “I shouldn’t have waited so long.”

  But she is already busy slapping powder on my legs and tucking protective cloth beneath the edges of my underpants. I continue staring off to the side, deep into the eyes of my own reflection in the mirror on the opposite wall. The girl is so quick and skillful that I almost forget the pain as she blows on the steaming wax, slathers it onto my skin with a Popsicle stick, pats it down with a rag, then tears it mercilessly from my body without a moment’s hesitation, rhythmic as a machine.

  The pain is intense but I never so much as wince: To make even the slightest jerking movement is totally out of the question. I remain perfectly still, gazing at my own face, deeply proud of my valiance. If—and it has happened, albeit seldomly—I receive a compliment, for example, “You tough lady,” it is as though a gold medal for bravery has been placed over my modestly bowed head. My eyes closed and head still resolutely turned to the side, the girl continues yanking my legs up and down, shifting me over on my side, furiously ripping out the hair with quick snaps of the wrist. By this point she is sweating more than I am.

  Before I can unclench my teeth, she is rubbing baby oil roughly into my inner thighs. I pull on my clothes, my skin still tingling, as she crumples the paper from the table into a ball and throws the wax, thick with my hair, into the trash can. In seconds, all traces of my visit have vanished. Downstairs, I slip her a tip almost as large as the bill itself.

  But hair removal does have its limits. When I met my best friend, Lina Katz, we were standing in front of the Xerox machine of the university French department, clutching our lists of texts to prepare for our exams. I glanced searchingly down the row of titles on Lina’s paper and spotted Garnier’s Renaissance tragedy Les Juifves, The Jewesses.

  Half an hour later we were sitting at a nearby café sipping double espressos, dividing a raspberry brownie down the middle and interrupting each other as we talked shop.

  “Calves?” I asked.

  “Shave,” she answered.

  “Thighs?”

  “Wax.” Then it was her turn. “Underarms?” she th
rew out.

  “Wax,” I countered.

  “Eyebrows?”

  “Pluck.”

  I pointed to my upper lip. “This?” I asked, pausing dramatically.

  She took a sip of coffee, I held my breath.

  “Pluck.”

  “Amazing!” I cried, lurching forward and knocking the remains of the brownie off the table. Our hair-removal technique was absolutely identical—I was in disbelief. Then Lina threw me for a real loop.

  “What do you do about your arms?” she asked.

  “My arms?” The idea had never even occurred to me. I thought it was a hirsuteness I would just have to live with, like a purple birthmark or a raised scar. We lay our forearms on the round café table, side by side, and studied them objectively. Lina’s were just as well-adorned as mine.

  A week later, the two of us were in Lina’s apartment taking the last drags of a nice-sized joint. The lights were low, Rembetika purred on the stereo, and a large box of Jolen Creme Bleach was already opened. I waved the little white plastic spatula like a sword in the air. “Shall we?”

  We stirred what seemed a huge amount of powder and cream together as directed, and carefully spread the mixture onto our own left arm, then each other’s right. Covering the whole area, elbow to fingertips, took a good 20 minutes, and then we had to wait another 15 while the concoction stiffened and crystallized on our skin.

  “Time!” Lina shouted.

  We both gasped as we took turns scraping off the solution. The results stunned us into shock. I could not recognize my own hands with the invisible blondeness now coating them. “Whose arms are these?” I repeated over and over in a stoned drawl.

  “This changes everything!” Lina breathed, standing before the mirror trying out endless variations of gestures and expressions: hands defiantly on hips, arms nonchalantly folded across chest, chin resting dreamily in the palm of her hand.

  “I’ll never wear long sleeves again,” I declared, going through the five basic ballet arm positions and pas-de-chatting giddily around the room. At that very moment, one of my flailing limbs hit the Jolen tray. It wavered for a second and then overturned, landing on the seat of Lina’s navy blue velvet armchair. We froze.