Sweet Like Sugar

by Wayne Hoffman

  “Very funny,” I said. “I suppose Michelle’s told you all about him and how creepy he is?”

  “Creepy?”

  “Yeah, that he’s on my couch every afternoon, but we’ve never even had a conversation?”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad, dude,” he said with a sly grin, like a real guy. “Cut right to the chase.”

  I stopped for a moment.

  “You’re talking about the rabbi, right?” I asked.

  “Rabbi?” said Dan. “You’re dating a rabbi?”

  “No, I am not dating a rabbi,” I clarified. “What did Michelle tell you?”

  Michelle came out of her bedroom and joined the conversation. “I told Dan that you met a guy the other night at that new bar,” she said. “That guy. You know, what’s his name?”

  “Pete,” I said.

  “Right, Pete,” she said.

  “That’s who I’m talking about,” said Dan.

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, I wouldn’t call him my new boyfriend. We just met. But we’re getting together on Friday night.”

  “So what’s he like?” Dan asked. “Is he hot?”

  I loved that Dan wanted to know if my date was “hot.” Straight guys get a bad rap a lot of the time, but sometimes they can be the perfect antidotes to everyone else. A straight girl might have asked what Pete did for a living, or what we talked about when we met—Michelle’s first two questions. A gay guy might have asked where he lived (to see how much commuting would be involved in a relationship) or what he liked to do in bed. Dan didn’t care about Pete’s job, or his apartment, or his sexual preferences, or even what he looked like objectively. He wanted to know if Pete turned me on.

  “Yeah, he’s pretty hot,” I said.

  “Good for you, dude,” said Dan. And then he gave me a thumbs-up.

  Approval.

  “But wait a minute,” Dan said, “who did you think I was talking about? Who’s this rabbi?”

  I looked at Michelle: “You didn’t tell him? I figured you’d have told everyone by now.”

  “Honestly, Benji,” she said, “I didn’t think the old guy would stick around this long.”

  “How old?” said Dan.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Eighty, eighty-five.”

  “Dude!” said twenty-something Dan, this time with definite disapproval. Such a versatile word—dude.

  “It’s not like that,” I insisted.

  “So what’s the deal?” he asked.

  “I’ll tell you all about it,” Michelle said before I could get a word out. “But let’s get going, or we’ll miss the movie.”

  “Right,” said Dan, getting out of our easy chair and running a hand through his fine blond hair, pushing it out of his face. Standing side by side, both in T-shirts and shorts, they were a good match: Dan tall and lanky, his shoulders permanently hunched slightly forward, his large hands hanging loose at his side; Michelle petite and darker, her green eyes always alert, curly brown hair piled atop her head to keep her neck cool. The height difference made their casual kisses seem awkward, but Michelle was the perfect height for Dan to wrap his arm around her shoulder. Which he did, often. Michelle loved that. I could see it in her eyes.

  “You going out tonight, Benji?” Dan asked.

  “I haven’t decided yet,” I said, even though I’d already decided to stay home and get reacquainted with some old Bible stories; I’d dug my childhood picture book out of a box of my old stuff that my mother had given me when she commandeered my childhood closet for her “papers.” But that’s just not the kind of thing I could have easily explained without seriously damaging the coolness I’d started to build up in Dan’s estimation.

  “Whatever, dude, have fun,” he said.

  “Don’t wait up,” said Michelle as she opened the front door.

  “I won’t,” I said, closing the door behind them. Then it was off to my bedroom with my picture book. Just like old times.

  I knew, because my mother told me, that the book was a hand-me-down, a gift my grandparents originally gave to my sister when I was just a baby. But as far as I was concerned, the book was mine and always had been.

  The book took me back to a time when I really loved Judaism. It was never about God for me; I’d never been a real believer as a kid, and I’d never had a spiritual crisis that made me change my mind since then. But that lack of belief didn’t matter. I still loved Judaism and the way it was represented in this book. I relished the ancient melodramas, the neatly resolved plots, the simple life lessons. And I adored the drawings, images that blended the freeform style of 1970s cartoons with reverent depictions of historical heroes. As a child, this was what being Jewish meant: stories, characters, history, color.

  My parents added on another layer of meaning—primarily involving food—that also appealed, with their semitraditional, modest observance of holidays and traditions. Latkes for Hanukkah, apples and honey for Rosh Hashanah, challah for the Sabbath. Being Jewish wasn’t just who I was inside, it was something tangible, something I could taste. And it tasted sweet.

  This, of course, was before years of Hebrew school classes and topical Saturday morning sermons at my family’s Conservative synagogue drained away almost everything I liked about being Jewish and buried it under an airless layer of laws and restrictions and suffering. The chosen people’s celebratory rites were grayed by cautionary tales of persecution and woe and impending collective trauma. By the time I was bar mitzvahed, my whole impression of Judaism had changed. I thought not of braided loaves of challah shiny with egg, but of death camp rations of black bread and brown soup. Not of Hanukkah’s miracle of the Maccabees, but of Israel’s War of Independence, the Six-Day War, the invasion of Lebanon. Anti-Semites lurked around every corner, and we would always be pariahs wherever we went. The only things keeping us together were God and our community, both of which made constant demands and neither of which was ever satisfied. Whatever you did, there were rules to govern you; whatever you thought, there was shame to paralyze you. Thou-shalt-not this, thou-shalt-not that. Listen to your mother and pray for the Almighty’s forgiveness.

  But opening my old picture book, I was reminded of a less complicated version of Judaism: Moses coming down from Mt. Sinai, while the children of Israel danced with abandon around the golden calf below. Jacob and his twelve sons—one of them dressed in a vibrant, almost psychedelic coat—tending sheep in the fields. Abraham preparing to sacrifice his son Isaac, a knife held firmly in his raised hand. Noah and the animals on a giant wooden ark, a rainbow on the horizon. And that picture of Adam and Eve in Paradise. Under the apple tree. Just as I remembered it.

  The last picture in the book was from a different Bible story that I’d almost forgotten: Queen Esther stood in the middle of an elegant banquet, amid tables laden with golden pastries and green grapes. Her accusing finger pointed at Haman, the man who would kill all the Jews in Persia, cowering before her. Esther’s face betrayed only steely confidence, her long dress a swirl of angry reds and purples.

  I remembered a Purim from many years before.

  I was seven years old and I was crying.

  We were supposed to show up for Hebrew school in costumes. Ideally, they should have been relevant to the holiday, a sort of masquerade based on the Book of Esther. But kids who attended Congregation Beth Shalom of Rockville, Maryland, weren’t so hung up on biblical authenticity. They were planning to come as Batman or the Little Mermaid or miniature Washington Redskins.

  My mother laid out a clown costume for me, complete with baggy orange pants and yellow suspenders, and a red ball to stick on the end of my nose. I was not having it.

  My sister, Rachel, was already eleven, and sixth graders didn’t have to put on stupid costumes anymore. But they’d be performing the annual Purim play for the whole school, and she was playing the lead, so Rachel dressed up as Queen Esther, the heroine of the Purim story. My mother was allowing Rachel to wear makeup for the play and she helped her make gold slippers out
of old ballet shoes and glitter. She was wearing her fanciest skirt, made of shimmery black material, and my mom loaned her a gold blouse, which my sister could almost fill out already.

  Rachel looked like a grown woman. After reminding my sister not to get that blouse dirty, my mother stepped back and told her that she looked beautiful.

  Nobody was paying attention to me. I stood pouting in the doorway of the bathroom, where they were fixing Rachel’s hair. “I want to be Queen Esther, too,” I insisted.

  “You mean you want to be King Ahasuerus,” Rachel spat at me without turning away from the mirror. “Boys can’t be queens.” She didn’t look so beautiful anymore.

  “No, I want to be Queen Esther,” I repeated.

  Rachel put down her hairbrush. “That is so queer.”

  I started to bawl.

  My mother led me into my bedroom and tried to coax me into the clown costume, but I refused. She handed me the baggy pants and I threw them on the floor. She offered me the round red nose and I hit it out of her hands.

  “Mom, make him get dressed,” Rachel protested from the hallway. “He’s going to make us late.”

  My father would have put his foot down: “Stop crying and get in the damn clown costume, or you can forget about watching television this week.” But my father was playing tennis, and my mother had to get everyone ready in time to drive the Sunday morning carpool. She considered the situation for a moment. Then, caught between my tantrum and my sister’s impatience, she caved in.

  The costume was simple, piecing together bits of an old fairy princess costume that Rachel wore for Halloween years before: a lavender skirt, a pink top, a blond wig, a gold tiara. I skipped the clip-on wings. But I was drawn to the star-tipped wand; my mother told me that they didn’t have magic wands in ancient Persia, and I conceded the point. She also wouldn’t let me wear makeup, despite my repeated requests.

  My sister refused to sit near me in the station wagon, so I climbed up front with my mom while Rachel got in back. We picked up two other kids from around the corner, a boy wearing a karate uniform and a girl dressed as a ballerina, who squeezed in next to Rachel. They were snickering, but nobody dared to say anything out loud while my mother was there.

  Once we got dropped off at Beth Shalom, however, everything changed. The karate boy pushed me into a door and sneered, “Ladies first.” The ballerina told me I looked funny.

  “I’m Queen Esther,” I responded. “She’s a hero. She saved the Jews. You’re just some dumb ballet dancer.”

  “Boys can’t wear skirts,” the ballerina snipped. Apparently, Esther’s heroism meant nothing to her.

  My sister, who was big enough to defend me from these taunts, had already gone inside to get ready for the play. I was alone.

  When I walked into my classroom, I tried to muster a smile. Mrs. Goldfarb looked over with a pleased look—a look that quickly changed once she realized who was beneath this cheap wig and plastic crown.

  “Benjamin?” she asked quietly. “Oh, dear.”

  I would soon forget what all my classmates wore for this masquerade, and I would never even notice Mrs. Goldfarb’s clothes. But for them, for all of them, this image of me, a vision in lavender and pink polyester, would become indelibly etched in their memories. They were all paying attention. They would not soon forget this seven-year-old boy standing before them, bravely adjusting my wig even as the tears began to stream down my cheeks.

  Thursday and Friday the rabbi came as usual, knocking on the door around three in the afternoon, when the heat was at its worst, and heading back to the store about an hour later. Mrs. Goldfarb had apparently recused herself permanently and left any further negotiations to the men.

  Rabbi Zuckerman didn’t disturb me at all anymore. He didn’t make any demands or require any attention from me.

  Plus, while I was working on the Paradise campaign, he became my silent muse, keeping me focused on the biblical themes. I surfed online for Jewish websites that might have more images connected to Bible stories. There were many, of course: some with long religious explanations that quickly grew tedious, some with childish rhymes to tell the simple tales. The pictures ranged from classical paintings to downloadable clip art. I spent hours poring over the Jewish sites while the rabbi lay on my couch. I never found anything as compelling as my own picture book.

  I sat in my dimly lit, comfortably cool office, experimenting with fonts and colors, trying one picture and then another, until I was satisfied that I was onto something.

  Using photos I’d found online—on gay sites, not the Jewish ones—I made three prototype advertisements, each bearing the same tag line at the bottom in a bold sans-serif typeface: Paradise: Found.

  “Let There Be Light!” the first ad proclaimed. Two men with impeccable pecs stood on the left side of the page, seen from the waist up; they wore only dark sunglasses, staring up at the sun on the right side of the page. In between, the copy read: “The city’s best nightlife—now available during the day. With the only Sunday afternoon beer blast in town, Washington’s newest bar is the hottest spot in creation.”

  “Sin Is In” read the second ad, which featured a goateed man holding a red pitchfork and wearing nothing but two small red horns and a tail—shot from the side to hide anything too explicit. “Grab some tail at our red-hot weekly party with DJ Damien, every Friday night,” read the text. “At Washington’s newest bar, the only real sin is going anywhere else.”

  The last one drew directly on my childhood picture book. “Give in to Temptation” it said across the top, in tall red letters. The text read: “Get fresh fruits. With two-for-one appletinis every happy hour, Washington’s newest bar is like heaven on earth.” The image was reminiscent of the Adam and Eve drawing in my book, except in my illustration, doctored heavily with Photoshop, the snake was wrapped around a martini glass rather than a tree, the seated Adam was a gym-buffed stud, and Eve had been replaced by a second gym-buffed Adam, standing in front of the glass and holding a strategically placed Red Delicious apple.

  I was printing out the mock-ups on Friday afternoon when the rabbi got up to leave my office. For a moment I considered showing them to him and explaining how he had inspired me. I quickly regained my senses, though, just in time to see him put his yarmulke back on his head, open my door, and walk outside into the heat.

  I put the mock-ups and a cover letter in a manila envelope and brought them to the bar Friday evening. The bartender told me to slip them under the door of the office in the back.

  Phil was sitting at the bar, fingers wrapped around a gin and tonic; I’d phoned him barely an hour earlier and he said he’d meet me at Paradise “for a quickie.”

  “Can’t stay long,” he said as I pulled up a stool. “Dinner plans.”

  “Wow, that’s more than a whole week with the same guy,” I said.

  “No, this is someone new,” he said, chuckling at himself. “I know. Quelle surprise.”

  “I just don’t know how you keep their names straight.”

  “If I forget, I just call them ‘baby,’ ” he said.

  “Seriously?”

  “Geez, Benji, what kind of guy do you think I am?” he teased. “I write their names on the palm of my hand.”

  I took Phil’s hand and checked his palm. Clean.

  “And how about you?” he asked. “Meeting the guy from Monday night? Benji’s latest blond?”

  “His name is Pete,” I said.

  “And this time you don’t have to work tomorrow. Maybe little Benji is gonna get lucky?”

  “Luck,” I deadpanned, “has nothing to do with it.”

  I told him about the ad campaign I’d proposed for Paradise.

  “You went biblical?” he asked. “Seems like a strange way to sell a gay bar.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Guys wearing fig leaves seemed like a pretty good place to start.”

  “Just quit before you get to crucifixion. Too kinky.”

  “That’s your Bibl
e,” I said. “Not mine.”

  “Right, like you have a Bible.”

  “Just because I don’t believe it, that doesn’t mean it’s not mine.”

  “I suppose,” he said.

  Phil left after he finished his drink and Pete arrived a few minutes later, wearing—thank goodness—a shirt without an alligator. I didn’t want to stick around long, because at that point Paradise reminded me of work. So after one quick cocktail, we ducked out and walked over to Seventeenth Street, to a coffeehouse.

  I asked him about his week and he recounted a couple of funny stories about one of the attorneys in his office, a closet case with bad breath. Then Pete, true to his word, started asking me about myself.

  I told him about growing up in the suburbs of D.C. and how I had decided to stay in the area while my sister had chosen to move all the way across the country, to Seattle. I told him about how I double-majored in English and art at the University of Maryland, despite my parents’ insistence that neither of these majors would ever earn me a dime. I told him about the string of jobs I’d endured after college—designing advertisements for a local magazine, crafting pamphlets for a nonprofit AIDS service organization, teaching arts and crafts at the YMCA, working in a printing shop in a mall—and how I’d taken a gamble and opened my own office the previous winter with just two steady clients: a suburban gardening club that needed someone to lay out its monthly newsletter and a downtown rock venue that hired me to design posters and newspaper ads, barely enough to pay rent on my office.

  And I told him about the rabbi.

  “Freaky,” was his first reaction.

  “Which part?”

  “The whole thing,” he said. “Is he one of those whatever-they’re-calleds, with the black hats and the curls?”

  “Hasidim? No. He’s just a rabbi.”

  “Still.”

  “I know, it’s pretty weird. But I don’t really mind it, to be honest.”

  “You’re Jewish, right? Steiner?”

  “Yeah.”