My First Jew

My first Jew is a tale taken from the upcoming memoir, So.. a Jew, a Mennonite and a Mason walk into my life, and…
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Truthfully, this story is about my second Jew. Meaning the second tribesman I pretzeled, lox’ed and bagel’ed, gefilte fished (one can make any phrase have sexual subtext) burned the brisket, you get the picture. Yes, this twist and tale is about the second Jewish boy/man who entered self and life.

The first one I try to suppress.. it wasn’t his Ashkenazi breathing (heavy and hoarse), or his fur-like skin which made me wince and tighten (and itch, I’m very allergic), it was that I found myself sharing sheets with someone .. someone…I didn’t even want to share space with. So.. sheets shared, sex swapped, I swore I would never get in bed with a Yid again unless I, and the ‘others’ got called to the town square where we were told to ‘only bring one piece of luggage’. I always think it’s a good thing my crowns are porcelain not gold, just in case some Fraulein wants to add gold lame to her china.

So.. following the first Jew night stand and a post-sex aversion to any music by Chris Isaak, I swam in more multicultural seas:
a Mennonite
a mason
a blonde beach boy
a sound guy with a love of the reefer,
a writer with a love of the drink,
a fundamentalist Christian
a black fundamentalist Christian, though a Democrat,
a first-generation Indian, full of hip hop hopes and immigrant pains.

And then there was—my first real Jew—beyond one night and a morning muffin. This one. .this first Jew was/is a person of my past, a high school friend, though we cannot recall having any significant conversations or interactions. He wasn’t a full-fledged crush-(that privilege belonged to the menshy SG) he was someone I admired, or maybe squeezed at (squeeze is less severe than crush) from a far. More precisely, I oggled at him in Geometry class. It was there that I fell for this quiet soul. Maybe it was the way he used his protractor, embraced postulates, rotated his compass, or maybe it was the sincerity behind his silence. Or maybe just the fact that he was passing (thriving actually) geometry and it was the only class in my life time.. LIFETIME that I could potentially, realistically, fail.

Geometric Falsehoods
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I could not for the life of me agree with Geometry’s premise of postulates: a proposition that requires no proof. NO proof? What? Add to that its inclusion of a world lived with.. assumptions, hypotheticals, and a need to order and name and solve.
“If it’s an assumption why do I need to prove it?”. Trying to convince me that the world was made up of only cylinders, triangles and rectangles –none of which I could point out on my overweight Great Aunt Bess’s body. She was curves and obstacles, and loneliness and pain. The need to shape and order a world full of curves, imperfect paths, unwieldy roots and limbs is oppressive.

Truthfully, I have a small motor problem (diagnosed in kindergarten) so It was hard for me to manipulate the compass-but not it appeared for the squeeze with the soft face and Heeb-like hair who sat adjacent to me and rarely uttered a word.
“Nice protractor.’
“Thanks.”


J' dates
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Fast forward 20 years where we (Squeeze and I) find ourselves together in his recently adopted town; the visit in part is the result of email exchanges full of flirt and fantasy. He is instantly familiar – like waking. Like the changing of seasons. Like home.

My mother did for awhile send me JDATE postings of men she looked up (in my geographic area), and whom she thought might suit me. Her words, "You’ll see...you’ll be more comfortable with a Jewish boy..” were(are) a kink in my neck. I usually wrote her back with, “make it a black Jewish doctor and you’ll have yourself a deal". No deal, yet.

It’s not that I intentionally avoided dating, playing pinball, goin’ down, eatin’ out…with Jewish men, a large part of it was and is lack of opportunity. I don’t or have not in years lived among many Jews. My closest Jew neighbor is a convert (she sews and cooks a lot and is so...not Jewish). Yet.. the first time I hung out with Squeeze.. my mother’s words moved from neck tension “You’ll see...” to a tangible truth.

Little Feather and Running Brook
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So.. this man of past appeared in my present. Our first adventure, 20 years later after we walked high school hallways, was surprizingly blissful. In my life of love or romance or dating or sex, it was one of the most unexpected, harmonic moments. It moved from skee-ball, to food, to a visit to his therapist (I waited across the street) to a vanilla latte, to late, late night conversations on everything from our Indian and Indian princesses princes' names*:
" Mine's Little Feather, I was little and light"
" I'm Running Brook. fast yet, slow?
And we poured out tales about our fathers and on loss and love unrequited. There was silence and sadness and later that night, sex and sweet talk, the sublime, and.. we won matching bracelets at skee-ball. Score!

**Indian Prince and Princess were son/father and daughter/father organizations where we ‘got back to nature’ or went camping without bug spray.***

Maybe I was desperate to not have to explain myself, maybe I was finally relieved that all my jokes were at least received, maybe after such a forced break from my past and the people –I finally was ready to remember, to acknowledge the world where I both flourished and floundered. Where a nose job was like getting a cavity filled. Where poverty, racism and classism were words to be read not experienced, nor attempted to be understood. Where people left and returned to live lives like their parents, full of creature comforts, and creatures who for the most part look and sound like each other.

This Squeeze was on the periphery like I. A wanderer. Tormented. Artistic. A life in the head, a hole in the heart, life. And living (like I) economically outside the world grown up in, and living a less traditional life than our contemporaries. Through knowing him, talking with him incessantly, creatively collaborating, I felt less like the outsider, the stranger in a strange land, I felt ..a little more whole, felt some hope.

IN-BREEDING
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My friend Sharon has often said, “the problem with Jewish boys is Jewish mothers, “ (her boyfriend is a 6’1 gentile actor-type). She blames them, the mothers, for many of Jewish boys' neurosis, severe self-doubt, lack of awareness, & anxiety, (Should I then blame my father for all of my nutbag of tricks? Most likely, yes). And my first Jewish boy, who is really my second, embodied many of those symptoms, or was certainly not immune to them.

But truthfully, that is what I found to be of comfort. Some people need to have leather seats in their German cars, some people need to have central air, or a Slavic/Polish cleaning lady, or Mexican landscapers, or weekly manicures, or a garbage compactor.. but someone who swims in sadness, lounges in compulsions, simultaneously doubts-self and ignites self- is comfort to me. It’s human, flawed and raw. And quietly,I felt love for it.. for its fearlessness. It’s fearless to fail and fall. To acknowledge pain. To wake up even when all you feel is darkness.

My first Jewish boy, who is really my second, I discovered was painfully similar to I. And it is/was in this discovery, this tapestry I sought hope and real possibility. I longed for late nights and lattes and long walks with no destination filled with stories of grandparents, past love and dreams deferred. I longed for lifetimes of creative collaboration, frenetic searches for the afikomen, and a chocolate phosphate with two straws.

My father, following the divorce from my mother, “dated” only a couple Jewish girls (one turned out to prefer women) but most of the women my father would find himself in bed with were chicksas---the Jewish’s boy’s trophy and the often polar opposite of the Jewish mother. My father, loved I think their long legs, their frizz-less hair, their symmetry, their interest in his ‘ethnicity’ or the fact that he told them he did, "two tours in Vietnam and was in a bunker," (truth he was discharged at 18 due to Crones) but moreover it was their (the women) lack of familiarity.

I believe my dad had love for these women but the love was a love of intrigue and assimilation. Prior to my birth, my dad changed his last name so he (and I..) wouldn’t sound so ethnic and Jewish, and thus be kept out of places and positions sensitive to Jews. Isn’t that what nose jobs are for? Mmph.

The story doesn’t really end here—but it is at an impasse. MY first Jewish boy, who is really my second, may indeed be my last. He, at this juncture, is returning to a prior path, one that was very destructive, but one filled with elusive beauty, long legs and frizzless hair. I have frizzy hair, shorter legs and am cute in a Sephardic-Julia-Louis-Dreyfuss kinda way, but more blonde. Not that it would matter.

He, (the first, no second Jewish boy) like I desires that which is outside, often out of reach, unfamiliar, unavailable and then works to make it part of the inside, in reach and familiar. It is exhausting. We make love so difficult sometimes, but perhaps that is its intention. It wouldn’t be love unless it was wrought with struggle.

Commonality , creative chemistry and comfort are not ingredients for love—I was swayed slightly by this squeeze to believe otherwise - but more than likely I’ll return to the pastures of gentile goats, Christian cows, and Hindu horses. Pure-breeds are so…’out’ these days…and mixed breeds (designers) are so.. in.

Cute jewish girl
Searching /wandering for
an opposing ‘tension’
Someone .. Irish.. Jordanian.. a Saudi?
Doesn’t need to be literate or funny.
Must love cats.