Sweet Like Sugar

by Wayne Hoffman

  “What will you do if you have kids?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?” I hadn’t really thought about kids. I still felt like a kid myself.

  “I mean, would you raise them the way you were raised? Send them to synagogue and Hebrew school? You’ve rejected all those things, but you had to learn about them first before you could make that decision. What would you do with your kids?”

  I stopped to think about it for a moment, chewing my Cornish hen.

  “I’d definitely want them to know they were Jewish and understand what that means,” I said.

  “How would you do that?”

  “Well, I guess we’d observe the holidays. And maybe I’d send them to Hebrew school—I don’t know. I had such a rotten time with it, but maybe I could find a better synagogue.”

  “You’d send your kids there, but you wouldn’t go yourself?”

  I hated the idea of pretending to like going to synagogue just so my kids would go, too. But even more, I hated the idea of dropping them off and making them do something I wouldn’t do myself.

  “I suppose if I sent my kids there, I’d have to go with them,” I said. “At least until they were bar mitzvahed. Then they could make up their own minds.”

  “So they’d get bar mitzvahed?”

  “Oh yeah, that much I do know.” I said it with certainty, but honestly, until that moment I hadn’t even considered the concept. But yes, now that I thought about it, that much I did know.

  Christopher was looking down at his goat cheese ravioli.

  “Benji, I don’t think this is going to work.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re Jewish.”

  “Yeah, but I told you, I’m not religious.”

  “You might not be observant, but you’re more religious than you think,” he said. “And anyway, it doesn’t matter if you’re not religious. I am.”

  I was accustomed to hearing Jewish people talk about the difficulties of interfaith relationships. I had never bothered to wonder if non-Jews had the same problems. Apparently, they did.

  “Look, I really like you,” he said. (Nothing good ever followed such an opening.) “But I’m looking for someone to settle down with, someone I might want to start a family with, have kids with. And part of that is someone to go to church with, and celebrate Christmas with. Being Christian is too important to me to give it up. And you don’t realize it, but being Jewish is too important to you to give it up. I would never ask you to. But that means this won’t work out.”

  I’d love to say that Christopher was an asshole about all this, that he made some anti-Semitic crack or said he couldn’t imagine looking at my hook nose every morning over the breakfast table. But in truth, he was sweet about it.

  We skipped the crème brûlée and kissed on the street. A kiss good-bye.

  I was getting frustrated. With Pete, it hadn’t bothered me so much when things didn’t work out; his rotten politics made him someone I was glad to stop seeing. But Christopher was different. I really liked him. We hadn’t broken up over a fight or because one of us met another guy. We broke up because of who we were. Or, more precisely, because of who I was.

  I wanted to talk to someone about it, so I drove to Dupont Circle and called Phil, asking him to meet me at one of the bars on Seventeenth Street. It was reasonably busy for a weeknight. Video screens were showing one of those reality shows where everyone’s competing to be the top chef or top designer or top hair stylist. I tried to look away and pay attention to Phil, but like all gay men, I found myself unable to resist the lure of Bravo. Our conversation had to be segmented and squeezed into the commercial breaks.

  I was telling him about my third and final date with Christopher while I nursed a beer.

  “You don’t even think about religion when you’re dating, do you?” I asked. “I mean, I know you’re not only going out with other Catholics.”

  “Not an issue at all,” he said. “You’ve seen most of the guys I’ve dated. White, black, Asian. Irish, Latino, Greek. I suppose some of them grew up Catholic, but who cares?”

  “What if you had kids?”

  “I’m pretty sure two guys can’t get pregnant.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I’m not planning on having kids, so that’s not an issue,” he said. “And honestly, I don’t really care what religion a guy is, as long as he’s not real religious. I don’t think I could handle a guy who wanted to go to church every Sunday, whether he was Catholic or Methodist or whatever.”

  “How about Jewish guys?”

  “I’ve dated Jewish guys. Remember Marty Gold? That was cool. But he wasn’t, you know, super Jewish.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He didn’t go to synagogue or wear one of those things on his head.”

  “Right,” I said. “How about me? Could you date me?”

  “Benji, we’re just friends,” he teased.

  “Not me, specifically,” I said. “Could you date someone as Jewish as me?”

  “You’re not that Jewish,” he said. “Or at least you didn’t use to be.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you’ve been spending all that time with the rabbi,” he said. “And putting all that Bible stuff in your ads. I don’t know. You talk a lot more about Jewish stuff lately.”

  “That’s funny, because I really don’t feel all that connected. But I guess it’s always been a part of me,” I said. “You don’t stop being Jewish because you stop going to synagogue. You don’t go to Mass anymore, but you’re still Catholic.”

  “Only kinda-sorta,” he said. “I mean, it’s not like a magazine subscription where you actually cancel your subscription, so technically I suppose I’m still on the mailing list. But that’s about it.”

  “I guess being Jewish is different,” I said.

  “Guess so,” he said.

  “It’s screwing up my love life,” I said. “Chosen people, my ass. I can’t even get a date.”

  Over Phil’s shoulder, I spotted a guy across the bar checking me out. Nice hair, unnaturally neat eyebrows, cute enough. But he was standing with a group of friends, discussing the television show and making predictions about which contestant would be eliminated at the end of the hour.

  He looked over at me during an advertisement and caught my eye.

  Then the show came back on, and he and his friends were rapt, all eyes on the video monitors, offering running commentary on the program.

  I debated whether I should go up and talk to this guy, or call it a night and head home. On the one hand, I reasoned, I should just write off the night as a dud and cut my losses. On the other hand, I thought, maybe I could salvage the night by meeting someone new and forgetting about the gentile who’d just dumped me.

  When I finished my beer, I headed to the men’s room, walking right past Mister Winky. “How’s it going?” he asked as I brushed past. I put on my butchest voice and said: “Good. Good.” Before I could think of where to go from here, I noticed that all his friends were watching me, probably trying to figure out if I’d be eliminated before the end of the hour. I became suddenly shy. “I was just going to the bathroom,” I said, and excused myself.

  Standing at the urinal, I kicked myself for walking away. Wasn’t I good enough to make it to the next round? I resolved to go right back and join their little group when I was done.

  But before I had finished, Mister Winky walked into the men’s room and stood at the urinal next to mine. “Hey there,” he said.

  “Hey,” I replied, staring at the wall.

  I finished my business and zipped up. He hadn’t even started his business. Or so I thought. I looked at him and he smiled, then turned slightly to reveal the erection in his hand.

  “Want to go in there?” he asked, motioning to the empty stall in the back of the bathroom.

  I did not. “That’s not really what I had in mind,” I said, and walked back into the bar, past his friends
, waved good-bye to Phil, and kept going out the front door.

  That wasn’t the first time I’d been propositioned at a urinal. The first time was many years before, by Avi Pinsky.

  Avi had the biggest dick of all the Gefilte Fish.

  We were all roughly the same age, boys who just finished seventh grade, bunking together at Camp Millwood, a Jewish boys’ sleep-away camp in Capon Bridge, West Virginia. Officially, our bunk was known as the Guppies. The older boys were also named after fish: Minnows, Catfish, Bass. At least those were our official bunk names. The standing joke was that we were all named for fish with links to Jewish culture. Herring. Whitefish. Lox. In the joke, the Guppies were the most Jewish fish of all: Gefilte Fish.

  Some of us Gefilte Fish had already started our growth spurts and looked like we might have our driver’s licenses; others still looked like elementary school kids. I was somewhere in the middle. My voice had not changed, but my feet had grown three sizes in six months, and I’d outgrown every item of clothing from the previous summer.

  Avi already looked like a sixteen-year-old. He had blond whiskers on his chin. At five foot eight, he towered over the rest of us. And his penis was so oversized, it looked like something he bought at a gag shop, like bug-eyed X-ray glasses or plastic Mr. Spock ears.

  I knew this because Avi proudly showed off his new trophy every night in our bunk. After the counselors made sure we were in bed, they’d head down to the pool to do whatever counselors did at night: smoke pot, listen to music, talk about campers behind their backs. That’s when Avi, the clown of our group, entertained the rest of the bunk. Typically, in the nude.

  Sometimes his nudity was incidental, the un-costume he wore as he went with a flashlight from bed to bed, teasing each kid, mocking one camper’s mannerisms or making up stories about another’s mother. Other times, his penis was the center of the show; it often served as his puppet in a sort of X-rated version of Shari Lewis and Lambchop, but with a lot more talk about tits and pussy. His shtick was quite popular, and always got Avi lots of laughs. I was often one of those laughing, despite myself.

  This time, though, I was not laughing, because Avi decided to pick on me. Probably because I’d ratted him out that afternoon for smoking a clove cigarette behind the bunk; now I’d have to pay.

  “Hello, Benji!” Avi was doing his penis-puppet routine, which involved him speaking in a high, squeaky voice while he held the head of his penis in one hand, using his thumb and index finger to open and close his urethra like a mouth, while his other hand held his flashlight, trained on his dick like a spotlight. “I want to be your friend!”

  My bunkmates were laughing. I was trying to ignore Avi, but it’s hard to ignore someone who’s pointing his penis at your face.

  “Awwww, won’t you say hello?”

  I gave in and muttered, “Hello.”

  “I think we’re going to be great friends, Benji!”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We have so much in common!”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Yes, we’re both total pricks!”

  That got lots of laughs. Even I chuckled.

  “And Avi tells me you’re a real dickhead!”

  I stopped laughing.

  “Do you think we can be friends?”

  The squeaky voice was getting to me. But I didn’t say anything.

  “Pleeeeease?”

  I kept quiet.

  “If you don’t want to be my friend, maybe you want to meet my brother. He’s a real asshole, just like you.” With that, Avi dropped his penis and started to turn around. I knew what was coming; Avi had farted on at least half the guys in our bunk already that summer.

  “Okay, okay, we can be friends,” I said.

  “Great,” said Avi. “Let’s shake on it.”

  I looked into Avi’s eyes, but he wasn’t looking back. He was looking all around the bunk, checking the audience response. I looked back at his dick, waving in front of my face. I decided to end this teasing, to call this clown’s bluff. I reached out and grabbed Avi’s penis in my right hand.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said, shaking my hand.

  This was the first time I held another man’s penis. In a moment, I took mental measurements: how soft it felt, how it filled my hand, how much it weighed against my palm.

  Avi froze and looked down, astonished, and quickly pushed my hand away.

  “Eww, you fucking freak!” he shouted. The squeaky voice thing was over—Avi’s budding baritone was back. “You grabbed my dick! I can’t believe it. You really are a fucking fag! You grabbed my dick!”

  Avi leaped back into his bunk bed, flipping off his flashlight.

  My bunkmates were staring at me in the dark, as if I was the freak, instead of the naked guy jumping around waving his dick in other guys’ faces. “What’d you do that for?” one of them asked.

  “I figured it’d shut him up,” I said. This wasn’t a lie. But it wasn’t really the reason I grabbed him. I wanted to know what it felt like, to reach for it, to hold it, to be that close.

  “Sick, Benji,” said another kid. “You touched another guy’s dick.”

  “What a fag!” Avi called from his bed.

  “Avi, you’re the one who told him to touch it,” said yet another camper. “Maybe you’re the fag here.”

  And that, once and for all, shut Avi up.

  The next day, all the Gefilte Fish were talking about what happened. Because a lot of guys were sick of Avi’s teasing, the story that finally became the official version portrayed Avi as a bully and me as the guy who stood up to him. I was happy not to sound like a creepy homo in this version, but it wasn’t completely accurate.

  Avi and I weren’t speaking. It’s not that we were giving each other the silent treatment; we were just avoiding each other. But later that week, I was in the poolhouse bathroom when Avi caught me by the urinal. There was nobody else around. Stepping up to the urinal next to mine, he pulled out his dick again and looked at me.

  “Hey, Benji,” he said in a normal voice. “You want to touch it again?”

  I scanned his face and mulled the question. Was this another joke, a trap to prove once and for all who the real fag was? Would Avi pack up and run as soon as I touched him, telling everyone what had happened? Would anyone believe Avi if he told? I got the benefit of the doubt once; would I get it again? And what if it wasn’t a trap? What if he let me touch it for more than a second? What if I never wanted to let go?

  What did I want? Why wasn’t this a simple question?

  “No,” I told him, leaving him alone in the bathroom, but still remembering how it felt to hold him in my clutching fingers.

  I ducked out of my office around lunchtime on Friday and stopped by the rabbi’s house. He’d given me his house keys, so I let myself in.

  It was the first time I’d been in his house alone. Free to look around at my leisure.

  The books fascinated me. There were so many—thousands, surely, spread throughout the whole house—that I literally didn’t know where to start. When I looked closely, however, I noticed that the rabbi did have a sort of system, a rhyme and reason that dictated which books went where.

  Books of scripture and religious commentary crowded his office—these volumes looked like they’d been frequently read, their spines cracked and often crumbling. The living room had books on Jewish history, ancient and recent, in English and Hebrew and a few in Yiddish; the Holocaust made up a predictably large segment of these books. The dining room held oversize books of photography and art, coffee table books about Israeli archaeology and bygone shtetl life in Eastern Europe. Cookbooks, naturally, crowded the kitchen, covering recipes for every Jewish holiday, representing Jewish communities from around the world: Hanukkah Specialties from Morocco, Passover Cooking Israeli Style, Shabbes with Bubbe: My Grandmother’s Recipes from the Old Country, and so on. (These books had been gathering dust, I surmised, since Sophie had passed away.) When I dared to enter the bedroom, its bed still unmade
, I saw shelves of how-to and why-do-we-do-such-and-such books—about weddings, funerals, educating children. There was also a single shelf of poetry books—Jewish poetry—on one side of the bed. Were these Sophie’s books? Did she get a shelf for herself, I wondered, and did the rabbi ever read these poems over her shoulder in bed?

  The rabbi and I had no books in common in our respective homes. No surprise here—my own tastes ran to David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs, Barbara Ehrenreich and Al Franken, Dennis Cooper and Michael Cunningham. But what surprised me was how different the rabbi’s collection was from my parents’. In my parents’ living room in Rockville, there was a fairly extensive collection of Jewish books, but in a very different vein. Fiction by Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, and Sholom Aleichem was predominant. Their photo books contained nostalgic paintings by Marc Chagall and sepia-toned photographs from Ellis Island. Their cookbooks had titles like Kosher Chinese Cuisine and The Modern Israeli Kitchen. There was a copy of the Old Testament and a battered siddur that I’d used in Hebrew school, but that was about as far as our liturgy went. And their bookshelves held a host of non-Jewish books, from the Tom Clancy novels my mother devoured to the Civil War histories my father preferred, with the occasional biography of Bill Clinton or Martin Luther King Jr. thrown in for variety.

  Two Jewish households.

  I went to the rabbi’s study to fetch his things. Alone in the room, I could have opened his drawers, rifled through his papers, discovered his most shameful secrets. But what kinds of secrets could an eighty-something widowed rabbi have? A resin-coated bong? A stash of Asian porn? Not Rabbi Zuckerman, I figured. This man didn’t have any secrets.

  I grabbed his glasses and his prayer book and left, locking the door behind me. Then I took the mail out of the mailbox at the end of his driveway and headed to Holy Cross.

  The rabbi was napping when I arrived, but he quickly awoke when I sat down in the chair by his bedside.

  “The doctors say I should be released very soon,” he said. “Not tomorrow—I told them I would have no way to get home on Shabbat. But maybe Sunday.”