Reader, I thought this was because I had no sense of humor. I thought this was because I was a prim and unfree prude. I thought this was because I was no fun at all.
So it was that my mother was a goddess of sex who I was always failing, always disappointing.
Becoming friends with a member of “the radiant breed” who had sex at all hours would finally make me worthy of my mom, I thought.
(In a smaller way, my ex Jen was a goddess of sex for me, too, because she was nonmonogamous and bisexual and often rather cruel to her partners. )
Part of me wanted to become close with Jennifer's sex-god gay man, and perhaps take him from her.
Reader, that is exactly what I did! Although by the time Andy and I had become close, taking him from her or even hanging out with sex gods had become irrelevant.
That is because, to my complete surprise, I had found something much, much better than that: his friendship.
Andy was not from Olympus, it turned out, but from Faerie, my own realm. He was, shockingly, like me.
Andy often took a long time to call me back, but he did call me back, and then we talked for hours. Despite his periodic withdrawing, I had never found anything so tender and comforting. We talked about everything—what it was like to be hit or coerced, or to be seduced by evil wizards when we were children. How much we wanted to be open and to love.
I’d never talked to anyone else the way I talked to him. In the six years we were friends I felt a hot warmth like brandy in my insides.
Andy, who’d been a child actor, got me to understand theater and what it was and what it could do. This was something I had never grasped, because golem theater is focused far too completely on the reactions of the audience. He suggested seriously that I take Martha Sewall’s class in performing with masks. I think he recognized me, reader.
He utterly and completely loved my work. And he hated my enemies, and made fun of them. When a lesbo writer we both knew responded angrily to a letter to the editor I’d written criticizing her, he jumped to my defense. The writer—a very nice woman and a good writer, actually—had unfortunately said that lesbians tended to make more money than straight women. But after I wrote a furious screed complaining, Andy and his friend Pete had made endless fun of Lesbo Writer’s defensive reply, exclaiming loudly in restaurants, whenever they saw her, “Well, if it isn't Little Miss Minkowitz! I have a thing or two to say to you!”
My friend brought me impromptu gifts, like a book of Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales, a battered copy of Sade’s Justine.
I called Andy my brother. I’d never had one, and men were so identified with The Other in my family that the idea of having a brother was like entering into a family relationship with a boa constrictor, or an amphibian.
But Andy would call me “dear one,” and in keeping with the tradition of males expending themselves on behalf of the women in my family, he said he would die for me.
“Er, isn’t that a bit morbid?”
“Wouldn’t you die for me?” Andy looked at me a little balefully.
“I would fight for you,” I told him, meaning I would risk death but not try to seek it out.
Does all this sound fake to you? Bear with me. Before all the peculiar things that happened at the end, I felt utterly known by him, reader.
It would be easy to underestimate what this friendship gave me. I could talk to Andy about my vulnerabilities, my deep embarrassments. That hadn’t really happened before for me with anyone. I could actually talk honestly about my powerful ambivalence about sex and getting close to people. More important than that, even, Andy was the first person I could ever reveal my anger to and still figure out how to keep him as my friend.
Golems have always had a difficult time getting angry without destroying entire villages and tearing human beings limb from limb. It was a possibility in myself that frightened me to death. But Andy and I worked out how to tell each other we were angry. I had never trusted anyone before this enough either to share my anger peacefully with them, or to let them tell me about theirs.
Was this trust? We listened to each other. How far it went may be another story, as it was a first-time trusting experience for me and surely one of the first times for my brother Andy, too.
When he didn’t call me back for long periods, I’d get angry, and tell him so. I would also keep calling, partly harassing and partly desperate, pleading. Eventually, less desperate because I had actually understood that he loved me, I was not so wounded by his absences. When I became less woundable, he called me more frequently. Later on, Andy introduced me to his younger brother, Barry, an actor and writer who had just moved to New York. Barry and I started to socialize sometimes, too.
A year later, when Andy and Barry had a mega-fight, Andy announced in sharp tones, “I don’t want you to see or talk to Barry ever again!”
I could picture his eyes smoldering through the phone. His voice was stern, and I took it as an incontravenible command: I was heartsick to receive one from Andy. My only real friend had never given me a command before. I expected Andy to treat me like a human, not a golem.
I responded the way I usually do to people’s commands: by getting shocked and upset but paralyzing myself—as with a convenient neurotoxin that I carried in my bag, so I would not go out of control and burn down all the goyim.
I did tell my friend I was perturbed by his demand that I choose between him and his brother. “I feel like you’re trying to control me,” I said.
“What if I want to control you?” said Andy quietly.
This statement, reader, paralyzed me even more. On the one hand, I was so horrified that I could not respond, like an insect that has been rendered immobile (this time by a larger, predatory bug).
On the other hand—oh reader, will it appall you if I tell you I also found Andy’s saying he wanted to control me sexy? I did. God help me, I found it as sexy and romantic and steadfast as his promise to stalk me. Reader, I told you I was a golem.
His demand that I let him control me in this instance dramatically altered our relationship for me. It’s true it was only the one instance, but his demand, and my failure to resist it, turned Andy into one of the humans for me, one of the owners: someone who felt entitled to master me.
I still loved Andy, but it was now like all the other loves in my life, a dangerous one in which I felt, once again, like a slave.
Still, I loved him! So much! In the moonlight, we would discuss our mutual attraction to sadomasochism and the ways we had tried to have it inform our sexual practice. In the rose gardens that we found in Greenwich Village (they are there, reader!) we reviewed his psyche and my own with compassion and even something close to objectivity. Andy came out to L. A. just to put on a tuxedo and watch me get my Lambda Literary Award at a glitzy awards ceremony. After he’d moved back to St. Louis, Andy flew to New York to celebrate my book party with me, hand over a huge bouquet of flowers, and introduce me at my reading for the partygoers.
I’d always been jealous of the men that Andy slept with for a night, an afternoon, an hour, but happily he had never had a boyfriend in all of the six years I knew him. “You’re really smart!” Edna had said to me about this. She said Andy and I were “brilliant” because we’d chosen to be emotionally intimate with each other, not a member of the same sex we really craved.
I was jealous of Andy’s other best friend, Ned, because Andy had once had sex with him. I have no idea if Andy was jealous of my girlfriends; I kept from him my plan that he eventually become the (artificially inseminating) father of my children.
Finally, Andy and I had a consummation of sorts at Justine, “an S/M restaurant” in Chelsea. Justine was a place on 23rd Street where you could order the kind of luxurious food that people imagined the Marquis de Sade eating, such as foie gras, whole sides of beef, and a decadent dessert served in a large female chocolate shoe. (The restaurant was as real as you are, reader. Don't second-guess me!) Guests could also order spankings and whippings, if the rec
ipient was willing. A staff of male and female dominants in leather was on hand to fulfill the special orders; tips were encouraged.
Andy’s people the Fair Folk, nearly wiped out by the church, have a hard time navigating the vicissitudes of love without employing at least a little protective cruelty. Certainly we golems do. My friend and I had spoken to each other about our longings to hurt and humiliate the rulers probably ever since our first luncheon at Café Otto (Andy called and invited me to lunch, our first official socializing; I think he had considered me a god of writing).
By the time we’d gone out to dinner at Justine, I’d “given up” S/M, reader, after a disastrous relationship with a very mean bottom. Besides that lady’s meanness, I was flabbergasted to find a lack of fulfillment in me when I hit someone—when, that is, I’d finally indulged those cravings that all golems are bred with, fear, are driven mad by, feel with our whitest-hot nerve endings, and eventually are killed because of. It felt nice at first, it’s true—I could make believe the bottom was my father or mother—but after a few weeks it had stopped being fun in any way. I kept wishing my girlfriend would kiss me or hug me, but all she wanted was for me to pound on her. Every blow felt dead to me eventually, like a corpse made of old pain and old anger. Over time, the deadness of presenting these corpses even to someone who really wanted them got to me.
Andy was another matter, however. I knew perfectly well that we still had those longings in common—we continued to talk about them all the time. I saw no reason not to make use of the opportunity the S/M restaurant offered for a singular communion with my honey.
(I really, really liked that he was feminine but a top. I knew that I was sometimes too soft and not nearly mean enough at all, but Andy was someone who could be fey and fanciful and still make people pay.)
As we pushed foie gras in our insolent red mouths with our fingers, watching the action over by the red damasked draperies, the cute gay waiter asked us curiously, “Are you a couple?”
I was thrilled that he asked, though I knew I couldn’t say yes. “We’re a couple of very good friends.”
Andy wanted to make it sound even more distant. “We’re a couple o' homos!” he smirked.
Both of us certainly had a lot of residual anger towards men. So we “graciously” sent a spanking by a female dom to a handsome straight man at a nearby table, whom we both found deeply annoying and attractive. He was a young, blond investment banker-type, with a female date who we imagined he was pushing into S/M when she didn’t want to go there. Our fantasy was he was planning to beat and humiliate her—just because men are skeevy. We sent him the spanking instead by the beautiful young dom, and he’d accepted, taking off his shirt as she directed him and standing at the whipping post in the center of the room so she could paddle him with a leather implement and her hand, hard, while all the other diners watched. She bared his backside to the room, too, and we watched it get red; finally she offered me a chance to hit him myself.
I’m not sure why I agreed. It felt terrible to even approach this man with the paddle. I hadn’t expected to ever hit anyone’s backside erotically again. After I did it—one blow—it felt as bad as I had imagined hitting someone again would feel.
But—oddly, I know—this yucky enactment felt like a beautiful communion with Andy anyhow, as though we’d touched each other— safely—through the medium of the handsome banker’s backside.
When we went outside, Andy needed a cigarette. Afterwards, he brought me the copy of Sade’s novel—tenderly inscribed, “kisses, Andy.”
So, how could such a deeply-felt union ever be parted?
Oh, baby, the worst thing about not being actual persons is that speech does not come naturally to us. We creatures of magic may be radiant—well, not me of course because golems are lumpy, though I am at least sparkly —, but speech comes to our tongues as entertainment or wheedling, not a medium in which to be understood, or, hearing it, to understand.
Pure-form golems, of course, could not speak at all, a sign of their inferiority to humans. (Although in some versions of this story, the most famous golem in history, the famous Golem of Prague—given the sham, human name of Joseph so he could blend in with the others—could in fact talk and even fall in love.)
Anyhoo, I was not a pure-form golem. My mother, as I’ve said, was too fancy for that and also too much of a Europhile and Hellenist (she had too little love for, and too little confidence in, our purely Jewish styles and traditions).
And so she mixed my wet clay with various stinking compounds produced by the alchemical process. With leftover scraps of meat like the ones medieval biologists had tried, in the old days, to “turn into” mice. Stapled it all to a few old transistors or some hulking, primitive computer chips. Like the elves, I was technically able to speak, but speech for me was too suffused with power for communication. All that held me together, after all, was some Hebrew and binary.
Andy and I were made of words, we almost were words, and we could only with difficulty and the most aching pain communicate by them. Like baby Moses after he did as God directed and put those burning coals inside his mouth.
Andy had tried various things—to act, to direct, to write grants for a feminist organization he believed in. (See, reader, he really was a yin-yang hero!) He was also a dilettante, and never tried anything for long. (My knight was supported by, among other things, a small family oil well.) But it is hard to make a go of it as an artist in New York even if you do have a family oil well—so he decided, shortly before my book came out, to relocate to his native St. Louis where it was easier to be an artist because rents were cheaper, and fewer people sneered.
I was dismayed, of course, that he had moved away; it gave the lie to my fiction that he was my husband. But Andy had gotten noticeably stranger that year, and in fact it was the first time in our friendship that I began to think of him as a little bit crazy. He said his New York massage therapist could heal him over the phone by uttering magic spells through the live phone lines to St. Louis. He said that his golden aura had just become able to be perceived by spirit beings who were tickled by its merry, rambunctious particles and tended to giggle as a result. When he came to see me in Manhattan at a Cosi Sandwich Bar, he insisted that I sit on a peculiar, throne-like chair because, he said, he was there to serve me and to meet all my needs.
Still—we had one more act of intercourse, as it were, that was an even truer consummation for me than our visit to Justine. Andy coughed up hundreds of dollars for plane fare to L. A. and a hotel room ( a different room than my hotel room, of course) to watch me get my Lambda Literary Award in May. This was a very husband- or boyfriend-like thing to do, I thought, and I was beyond thrilled that Andy had decided to be my escort. This was like he was saying to the world that he was my partner, my prince, and with me in a gorgeous purple velvet dress and Andy in his tux, it was like we were getting married. True, I did have to endure his tricking at the ceremony with a sweet young writer named Tom Flagstaff. Actually, I had an easier time with his fucking Tom than I’d thought, even though I was annoyed that Tom got to share my limelight by coming out with us to the special dinner Andy was taking me to after the awards ceremony. The two of them were clearly headed back to Andy’s room. In the morning, when Andy and I met for breakfast—for of course we stayed in the same beautiful and romantic, Spanish-colonial hotel—he told me more intimate details about his sex with Tom than he had ever spilled about sex with anyone before, letting me know, for the first time, about a certain body part of his that was very sensitive, and how he tended to squirm when the area was touched.
Despite my jealousy about Tom, I was really touched by the intimacy of Andy revealing his sexual details. For the first time, I shared with him some information about precisely which little segments of my own body were likely to be most keenly attentive. At the time, this was as good as intimacy got for me, sweet little reader; Andy and I, clothed, at the Spanish-colonial hotel, talking about our various engorgements.
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nbsp; And I was glad I was much less jealous about Tom Flagstaff than I would have been in years previous; I did not hate the very nice little Tom, and did not even hate Andy for fucking a man the same weekend he was supposed to be attending to me.
In fact, his eagerly coughing up those hundreds to join me in L.A. is what felt the most significant to me, I think, reader, as though I was the woman Erica Jong had in mind when she described the widespread cultural fantasy of men appearing just in time to gloriously rescue women with “sperm, soapsuds, silks and satins, and of course, money.”
I think I figured that because he made the commitment to cough up that money that he must be my Prince.
I wasn’t counting on—among other things—our mutual language problems.
From the very beginning, Andy and I had communicated in a weird pidgin, as we thought befit two friends who were a golem and an elf who’d long since been abducted from fairyland and hurt. For example, we came up with the word “cheese” to mean something that was a little bit like Bill Clinton, but it is not clear at all what we meant by this. The way we used it, “cheese” could mean anything—something unctuous in a good way or a bad one, something with no meaning at all or something pregnant with meaning. That is my take on what we meant by “cheese,” anyway—something that meant everything and nothing, just like Bill.
The way we used “cheese” was typical of our so-called common language. Reader, I believed our pidgin was a token of intimacy, a way of expressing thoughts only the two of us could share. In fact, it was a way to obfuscate—putting things in our strange code helped make them less understandable to both of us, and therefore made communication much bless intimate and dangerous. We might have been chattering in gibberish for all we were communicating to each other.
But—two months after our joyous reunion in L.A., Andy invited me to stay at his mother and father’s house in St. Louis, where Andy was living until he found an apartment. We’d never spent a whole week together before; but I, and I think my baby, too, were suffused with warm love for each other from the thrill of our sexual discussion and our Lambda Award partnering, as though we were now ready to take the next step in our relationship.
Growing Up Golem Page 9