'Life of Socrates': PART 2 of prologue to spontaneous encore to...Book I
I had many reasons for contemplating the act. Way more reasons than reasons not to. Among these reasons was something I could not confess to anybody. Not Mother, my therapist or a medical doctor. It wasn’t a secret that I was lonely. I had not had a girlfriend in many years. When my new bed arrived at the East Flatbush apartment, Abba said, ‘Maybe you’ll share it with somebody!’ He didn’t know how complicated the matter had become. Since I had been back from Israel, I tried online dating; Jewish online dating. Once, I had a date set up with a journalist, my age. Actually employed, unlike me, she worked as an editor in the Arts and Culture section of the website of New York Magazine. I checked her out online. She studied undergraduate at Harvard and then went to Yale Law School. The day of the intervention between Mother, Abba, and the European doctor and me was the same week our date was supposed to be. I had no money. I wrote her an email saying, ‘I’m having a nervous breakdown.’
She didn’t reply.
I wrote to her again: ‘Are we still on, anyway?’
‘Absolutely not,’ was her curt reply.
She was not a sensitive or empathetic person, apparently. Turns out to be she was the daughter of Dick Cheney. Her name was Rebecca Milzoff. (I thought of her as more of a Milzoffki, however…)Her father was Abba’s so-called private investment banker—and Rush Limbaugh’s—with offices in Manhattan, and Westport, CONN; he went by the name: Howard Sontag (Sontag Advisory, LLC). She didn’t even ask whether I was alright. I had her number. I tried calling. She didn’t pick up. I tried again, but still no answer. I texted…still no luck. That night, I didn’t go to sleep, due to the mania. When the sun arose, I video-recorded myself on the computer’s camera, trying to explain what I had meant by ‘nervous breakdown’ and what was really going on, and how it was minor, solvable. I emailed her again and sent the video message as an attachment. No response. Later that night, I tried her phone again. She texted me, saying, ‘Never contact me again!’ But for the next week, I couldn’t resist. I was obsessed. In my head, despite what I had told her while it had felt like there was an earthquake going on in my mind, that I was breaking down, I still felt like it could all be cool between me and her. Felt I was in control of myself now. I could still impress her, if only I had the chance to make her acquaintance in person. (I had strong first dates. I needed her to know that. I needed to somehow get the message across.) I was beginning to have delusions that her contacting me on Facebook was some kind of job interview or offer; based on the fact, I had made two pitches to Vulture for employment. Instead, she thought that I was stalking her. She never used that word, though. I wonder what she really thought of me. For more than a week, I acted on determination to meet this young woman. Defeated by her inaction, I eventually raised a white flag, got a hold of myself. This was in 2013 or 2014. In more recent years, the idea of online dating was preposterous. The idea of any kind of dating was out of the question. Not just because I was out of money. You see, I had a problem. This brings us back to my big secret.
It was back in my Israel days. When I first arrived as a new citizen, I went to an absorption program on a kibbutz. I farmed and learned Hebrew. Had a fling with a beautiful Hungarian Jewess a few years my elder, also a new Israeli immigrant. Her name was Marcela. She nicknamed me ‘New York’. She was petite and had orange freckles. She never cut her strawberry-blonde hair. It flowed down to her rear, below, to her legs. Her grandparents, all of them, (probably), had obviously—must have—survived the Nazi concentration camps. And her family stayed in anti-Semitic Hungary. It was all very fascinating. The first time we fooled around, we went for a walk on the kibbutz at night in the dark. We snuck into the synagogue, which the kibbutz members never used (kibbutzniks are—for the most part—very secular Jews and may or may not borrow their sentiments on religion from Karl Marx, whom, to them is not a specter of malevolence necessarily—the way he is in the American mind), and she gave me one of the most memorable of blow jobs. It reminded me of the blow job in high school in the auditorium of the Christian youth group retreat. Once, I was on the kibbutz, working, minding my business, when Marcela just walked up to me in front of everyone and began passionately kissing me. She made me feel like a king. Then, one night, she must have been high, or possibly it was the holiday of Purim, because she was dressed-up in black lace and had a mock whip with her. She came to my room looking to play a frisky game. I took a condom out of my wallet. ‘You know what? This settles it,’ I thought, ‘now, Marcela and I will make love. And Love means Intercourse, everyone knows that. You want American, honey? I’ll give you New York, like you always whine for!’ She wouldn’t stop resisting, I stress, playfully resisting. I awkwardly attempted to insert myself into her and there was significant vaginal resistance. ‘Is she a virgin?’ I thought to myself.
‘It doesn’t feel good for me…’ she said.
Was she kidding or not? She must have been, because she never ceased to animate her playful demeanor. My behavior was innocuous. We were both being aggressive. I knew that my behavior was in check, that despite my concupiscence, I was not disrespecting the 27-year-old lady. I came, finally, after much struggle. She pulled my condom all the way, stretching it as far as it would go, while staying on my penis, and let go, snapping it back, painfully punching my genitals. She began to laugh, insane laughter.
‘Ow! What the fuck are you doing, Marcela? That’s enough!’ I said in Hebrew, and sent her out of the room.
One time we had oral sex on the floor of the public, unisex bathroom in the little house on the kibbutz where all of our bedrooms were. I told my roommate what I had just done with Marcela, and he looked awkward, as if to say, ‘why would you be telling me this?’ And to this day, I really don’t know why I would ‘kiss and tell’ like that, let alone do it on the filthy tile floor of a bathroom.
Marcela was never my girlfriend; just a fling. In the future, after the program on the kibbutz ended and everyone went their separate ways, we would meet again, casually in Tel Aviv, at her invitation. Just friends now, it was never sexual again.
Times were definitely fun on both kibbutzim which I stayed on. The first one, where I lived and worked for the better part of a year, before I made aliyah, was Kibbutz Yagur. I worked at the zoo, scooping the shit of the animals and feeding them. They had an impressive array of wildlife, even monkeys at this zoo. Parents would bring their children to see the animals, I’d be working. Many times, Arabs came. They had a tendency to litter on the property, which was duly pointed out to me, and I came to believe with my own eyes. The second kibbutz I lived on, right after I made aliyah, was Kibbutz Mishmar HaSharon; not as old as Yagur and not quite as famous or large. One night, while living on Kibbutz Mishmar HaSharon, before I met Marcela, or before I started a relationship with her, a group of Anglo-speakers from the kibbutz program all went to the beach. It was at night, and there were no life guards. We all stripped down naked, the women included, and skinny-dipped in the Mediterranean. It was not a moment of modesty (tzniut), but I felt Elohim just the same. On the first kibbutz, before aliyah, the legendary Kibbutz Yagur, I did a one-week military training camp. I learned how to march, stand at attention and fire a gun; I even participated in a drill based on urban warfare of the Middle East region, in case I would have to later be part of an invasion of the West Bank, or Gaza, or Lebanon, or wherever else. On the second kibbutz, after aliyah, Kibbutz Mishmar HaSharon, I went one night in a van to a very strange military training exercise. I was, of course, planning on serving in the IDF; oh, how I wanted it, thought I deserved it, could taste the honor, mine all mine. It was a rainy night, and the crowd of pre-recruits stood around. We divided into twos and each pair started on their knees, in a quasi-wrestling-start-position, in a pit of mud, and we scrapped, one-on-one, splashing in the mud. Everyone did it to conquer their own fears, little me did decent, did it for the Jewish state.
When the kibbutz program ended on Mishmar HaSharon, I got myself a one-bedroom apartment in the Tel Aviv suburbs, in a town called Petach Tikvah (where, as I told you, I had to fight for my rights as an immigrant worker in small-claims labor court: see chapter X). I worked at a new restaurant this time, a chain called Aroma café, again as a dishwasher. (This chain has since opened-up franchises internationally and they have one in Kiev, several in New York, Miami, New Jersey and I don’t recall where else.) This time, at least I wasn’t scrubbing by hand. I was using the industrial dishwashing machine: you push the tray underneath the metal machine, pull down the door, then ‘swish’ comes the sanitizing fluid. You lift the door, and push out the tray, waiting for the dishes to cool off, before redelivering them to the kitchen, on the other end of the restaurant. I didn’t have a girlfriend but I discovered that fat, middle-aged Russian women gave erotic massages near the beach in Tel Aviv. I did that a couple of times. Then, I discovered a flyer advertising prostitutes that come to your house. I ordered myself a beautiful, young Russian call-girl. She arrived with her pimp, who stayed outside while we did our business.
These days, I waited and waited to be contacted by the army. Finally I received the order to be at Tel HaShomer, the recruitment base. Like I said, I was not accepted. But that day, during my medical exam, the doctor told me that I had a web of extra veins in my scrotum sac, called Varicocele, and that the condition would eventually make me sterile.
‘There eez procedure you can to have to reverse ze condeeshun,’ explained the military doctor, dressed in green fatigues, without a lab coat.
When I first came to Israel, for 10 days, after Daytop, I met a girl from Michigan and we were friendly. Her name was Zohar. One day, while seated together on the bus, she started kissing me. I was slightly disgusted, but started kissing her back. The tour brought us to a nightclub for the evening, where our making-out continued. After the trip, she used to call me sometimes. I didn’t want anything from her. Cut to Bar-Ilan University and it was probably the first week or two of school. She called me:
‘Scott, I’m in Israel.’
‘Amazing! Mazal tov! What are you doing here?’
‘I’m on a kibbutz program.’
‘Oh, wow! You’re gonna love it. I did two, myself. One before my aliyah, and one after.’
‘So, I was wondering, can I come visit you?’
‘Sure,’ I gladly responded. ‘I live in Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv. Where’s your kibbutz located?’
‘In the south,’ she responded, ‘so when can I come?’
‘How about this weekend? For Shabbos. We’ll have a picnic,’ I told her.
She arrived on Friday afternoon. It was a hot day, and we did some catching up, some food shopping and prepared the meals for Friday night and Saturday. That night she slept in my room. I had a roommate who wasn’t home. I didn’t have a proper bed in the apartment, but just a single used mattress that was laid on the floor and that I slept on. I didn’t offer it to her. I did not make a move on her. She did not make a move on me. At this point I was very absorbed in learning to live as an Orthodox Jew, studying the Torah, et cetera. I got a vibe that she was disinterested in the whole Judaism thing. Well, not completely disinterested, she had come, after all, to Israel to study Hebrew and work the land. But some people naturally have a more secular leaning. I think she just wanted to get out of Michigan. We spent most of the weekend together, just the 25 hours of Shabbat; she left Sunday, mid-afternoon.
I let it go for about six months, but eventually contacted an urologist and scheduled an operation, as the military doctor at Tel HaShomer had advised me to do. Being with Zohar reminded me that I needed a wife if I was going to live this lifestyle: ‘It is no good for Adam to be alone…’ (Genesis 2:18) And I was afraid of going sterile. A socialized medicine system, there are three medical insurance options in the country. For this kind of surgery, I had to apply and pay a little bit extra, for an upgraded plan. I didn’t want to go through this experience alone. At this time, I was living in a new apartment with two roommates, all first-year students at Bar-Ilan, stricter in their orthodoxy—which was probably good for me at this point—and born and raised that way. One of them was away, and I asked the other if he would pick me up from the hospital. He said, ‘no,’ and seemed to be embarrassed that I asked. I thought to myself, ‘I thought god people were into helping people out, especially their fellow Jews.’ So, I called Zohar. She said she would come up from the kibbutz and accompany me.
I waited nervously, in the waiting-room with her. The procedure consisted of them cutting my abdomen open and going through my stomach to access my testicles. The procedure wasn’t performed in the hospital, but on the top floor of a local shopping mall, a very strange, strictly surgical facility. Sober at this point, I refused the pain killers, and sure enough, after surgery, I had chronic pain. It felt like someone was kicking me in the balls, over and over. I never was intimate with a woman since. Wasn’t interested in Zohar. Marcela would be the last. I don’t know if that’s why, but it is a good possibility. Once I got over the disappointment of not being recruited into the Israeli army and school started, I remained abstinent.
I had an American friend at Bar-Ilan, younger than me, also a newcomer to Orthodox Judaism, but more comfortably brainwashed. He married an overweight gentile convert to Judaism. He set me up with a girl, Rivka. Rivka was from an Orthodox family, with divorced parents. She was a college student at a Jewish school they built in the West Bank, Ariel University, and lived on a settlement with her mother and younger brother. I didn’t know what to make of young Rivka. She talked—well, slow. Her eyes were—well, glazed over always, they were large black ovals, psychic-looking. Saliva formed in the corners of her mouth when she spoke. She was on a completely different level than any girl I had ever dated. There were no awkward silences. But the entire date would feel awkward, embarrassing, to me, not to her—obviously not. But I just wasn’t ready to cut her loose. Rivka talked a lot, you could say, and she was really very sweet. She had short blondish hair and always wore long-sleeve tops and long skirts. She had a strange mind, and was good at ‘Gemmatria’—a numerical, mathematical code based on the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. She was able to tell me what my Bar Mitzvah Torah portion was, just from knowing my birthday. One night, we were on a date at the mall, where I used to work as a dishwasher, and quite out-of-the-blue she turns to me and says, ‘We’ve got to do something about these Arabs.’ I was taken aback. I knew there were problems, but really? This was a random statement. Just what did she propose should be done? Embarrassed, I didn’t reply. One morning, after I had had three maybe four dates with Rivka, my phone went off. It was before eight in the morning but I happened to be up and on my way to school to pray in the synagogue. The call was from Rivka’s mother. I found this very weird, very inappropriate. She suggested that we get married. I was gobsmacked. Let the idea roll around in my mind that whole day. What would life be like? Of course, we would have to live in the land that we would call ‘Judea and Samaria’, what the world calls the ‘West Bank’, on a strict Orthodox Jewish settlement. What did she mean when she said, ‘We have to do something about these Arabs’? Did she want to kill them? Like do it herself? Deport them? Like Moshe Feiglin wants, and before him, Meir Kahane? I feared how radical she was. She saw the Arab minority in Israel as Amalekites; or Philistines; or the remaining Canaanites. The former is a more abstract, more metaphysical-feeling and translatable type of foe. Amalek is a biblical nation, one of Israel’s many enemies, which makes war often with the Israelites throughout the Torah. According to Maimonides, three of the Torah’s 613 commandments involve Amalek. The three ‘mitzvot’ run consecutively in the text and occur in the last book of the Five Books of Moses, Deuteronomy or in Hebrew, Devarim: 25:17—‘to forever recall what Amalek did to the Children of Israel’. 25:19—‘to wipe out the descendants of Amalek’. 25:19—‘to not forget what Amalek did to the Children of Israel in the wilderness’. (Further references in the Torah are made in Exodus {Shemot} 17:14 and in Samuel I {Shmuel} 15:3). It is all enough to make a person, a believer, very angry, very reactionary; and because this supposed nation has vanished from the earth, it seemed, there need be a way for serious Jews to still fulfill these commandments. Who will be the unlucky stand-in for Amalek? I knew that Rivka, her family and friends, had plans for the Arabs; I smelled that they were based on the commandments of Amalek, and shit like that. I smelled what their politics must have been like. They looked, as commanded, at Amalek as weakness. I looked—by default—at the religiously radical as dangerous. Rivka was my Amalek. I was commanded to wipe her out. So, I sent her an email one day after class. I simply wrote: ‘I can’t marry you.’ I didn’t list reasons why. She never responded. She heard me.
I didn’t have any physical contact with women, as per Jewish custom. When I got to Brooklyn, I remained abstinent, but not by choice. I missed feeling a woman’s touch. I felt heartrending that I had never gotten married nor had babies. Soon I discovered—and this is the big secret—I could no longer reach an orgasm when I masturbated. Nor could I ejaculate, it was total stasis. I could no longer fuck! Did the Rabbi curse me? Those Christian anti-Semites? And I didn’t have anyone I could tell. Who would you tell this sort of thing to, if you were single, and too abashed to admit to a physician that you pleasured yourself? Who do you blame? What do you blame? Was it a result of the Varicocele (after the surgery in Israel, I had a post-op, second opinion taken in a hospital in Manhattan, [another Jew doctor] upon a visit to Mother’s, by an American doctor with a Jewish-sounding last name. He told me that the surgery hadn’t done anything. That the veins had already grown back.) So why had I been sentenced to a life starved of procreation? Could it be a result of the surgery? Was it my new cocktail of psychotropic medication? Is it just bad luck? If it is, I’ve had it my entire life.
If I had ever gotten married, it would have been to my eighth-grade through ninth-grade sweetheart. If I was ever truly in love, it was with Abigail. She was born in Australia, then her family moved to Canada, then they moved to New Canaan, where she spent most of her formative years. We met in Latin class. She had gone to a different elementary school than I, because she lived on the east side of town, and I on the west. I called her one night and asked if she wanted ‘to be my girlfriend’. She said, ‘yes’, and right away, we clicked. Our first kiss was in the back row of the movie theater, during the showing of a movie that was produced and directed by and starring Barbra Streisand: The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996). Then, after a couple of months, her family invited me to their cabin in Vermont. She wore perfume that had a soft scent of peach, it drove me crazy. For her birthday, one year, I took her to see the Broadway production of the Vietnam War-themed musical, Miss Saigon. We went to a few Dave Matthews Band concerts and to see the bluegrass-jazz group, Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. For our one-year anniversary, Mom took me to the store, ‘Pennyweights’, where I bought Abigail a pair of small, green earrings. Years later, thinking back on it, they didn’t match her blue eyes, which must have been silly of me. Nonetheless, she wore them frequently. We went to the Christmas dance at school. Our parents met that night and took our picture. My first ever orgasm happened while we were sitting back on her couch, watching a movie in her basement playroom in New Canaan. She started stroking my penis under the blanket. I used to encourage her to wear her spunky short-sleeve polyester button-up shirt that had a cute blue and white pattern on it. I liked the feel of the smooth fabric on my skin, and the way the polyester retained the smell of her perfume, or body spray. She requested that I wear the silk underpants she had gifted me one Valentine’s Day. We became so close that we were inseparable. When we were not together, we spoke for long hours on the phone. Couldn’t stay off each other, I discovered I could reach an orgasm by humping her with our clothes on. We did this a lot; started stripping down to our underwear. Then we panicked, ‘Can you get pregnant this way?!’ We went again to Vermont, this time alone with her father, in the summer. The ski season was over, but we played golf. He was a tennis fanatic; forced Abigail to practice on their private court in the backyard. My Father was an avid golfer, maybe this was Abigail’s father’s way of being diplomatic, showing interest in the family of his daughter’s significant-other. I played well that day, scoring lower than Mr. Byrne. Her mother didn’t come to Vermont with us that time; she was a demure ‘southern bell’, originally from North Carolina, who loved her ‘scotch-ee-poo’.
During school, freshman year, one day I complained about a pain in my stomach. It started in the center of my belly and—as I explained to the school nurse—moved down to my lower right abdomen. It began as a dull ache and, as the day progressed, became a sharper pain. I struggled to walk in the hallway; the walking hurt, or so I complained to Abigail and the school nurse. It was the bumps that my stepping caused, which caused the pains. Pressing down on it was even worse. When I saw Mother that afternoon, she drove me to the pediatrician’s office in New Canaan. The pediatrician examined me. He pressed on my belly, on my abdomen.
‘Ow! Ow!’ I exclaimed. ‘Don’t do that!’
Mother was in the examination room with me. She had become concerned, but, surprisingly strong, was not really showing it externally.
‘You have appendicitis,’ the doctor said both with concern and matter-of-factly.
When he said it, the room filled with light; then started spinning, albeit slightly. ‘So, this is it.’ I thought to myself.
‘What do we do?’ Mother asked Dr. Flynn.
‘You should go straight to Norwalk Hospital,’ he said, understanding that he was dealing with a nervous young patient and his mother.
In the car, I told Mother that the bumps hurt me. Because of this, I don’t think she knew whether to drive fast or to drive slower. We got to the hospital and waited a very short time for the examination to begin. A nurse took my vital signs.
‘The general surgeon is on his way,’ she said.
When the surgeon arrived he told me I looked ‘green.’ He pressed lightly on my stomach, lighter than Dr. Flynn had, and I groaned in pain.
‘You need to have an appendectomy,’ said the surgeon. ‘We have to wait for an operating room to open up. It shouldn’t be much longer now.’
I asked to use one of the hospital’s phones, for this was before everyone had cell phones. I called Abigail. She wasn’t home. I left a message on her family’s answering machine, explaining what was happening and telling her that I loved her.
They hooked me up to an intravenous drip, feeding me Demerol. The drug hit me hard. My vision became fuzzy and my perception distorted. We got a private room, Mom and I. Abba was in the city, at work, but had spoken to Mother and was now heading back to Connecticut, on his way to Norwalk Hospital. Finally, an OR opened up and I was taken on the elevator to the right floor then wheeled, in my bed, to the room where the operation would happen. I said I was cold, and the male nurse provided me with an extra blanket. When I woke up, Mom and Abba were standing over me. Mother kissed me, but not Abba. The surgeon entered. He explained to me that my ‘appendix was indeed swollen’. I knew he was lying; an experienced, accomplished general surgeon, lying about and to his young, adolescent patient. How could he be telling the truth? I was lying. I was faking. I got away with it. I got what I wanted: to be the center of attention with everyone concerned about me. Above all, I craved Abigail’s attention; I needed her to nurse me back to health. Instead, the day after I got home from the hospital, she came over after school and I got her to perform fellatio on me, right below the bandage over the incision area. I guess, in a way, it was a form of nursing.
Back at the hospital, right after waking up from surgery, all I wanted to do was sleep. I spent the night in the hospital and Mom and Abba went home. The next morning they came back, Abba took a day off work. In the afternoon, Dr. Pierce, another pediatrician from the doctor’s office in New Canaan, was making his rounds, and came to visit me.
‘Have you urinated yet?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I replied. I had not even gotten out of bed yet. It felt like I couldn’t. My whole body felt too stiff. I could barely sit up in bed.
‘Well, they’re going to bring you a catheter. Then you’ll be able to go to the bathroom. You’ll see, there’ll be yellow all over the room,’ he was attempting to be hyperbolically humorous—but as was his personality, and the reason why I saw young Dr. Fitzpatrick instead—he never actually so much as cracked a smile. He always seemed serious, so when he attempted humor it was awkward and scary. Sure enough, a male nurse came into my room—which I was sharing with another post-op patient with a broken leg—with a long tube wrapped in plastic.
‘This’ he said, ‘is a catheter.’
The curtain between the other patient and me was closed. He proceeded to stick the tube up the hole in my penis, causing urine to fill up the tube and leading to a bag. It was excruciating. It stung like hell. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘this must be my punishment for faking appendicitis.’ The surgeon prescribed me Tylenol with Codeine. Mother administered the pills to me, but we didn’t finish the whole jar.
Ryan was my best friend from first grade, or so, until about junior or senior year of high school. Our parents were friends too, after us. He was taller and broader than I, more athletic. He had a jovial, sanguine personality, always joking like his mother. I had an unnamed contest going with him that eventually culminated in the embarrassing story I just told. It went all the way back to elementary school. At recess, we played ‘Kill the Carrier’ (an anarchic, every-man-for-himself version of American football). One day, Ryan was carrying the ball. He ran and ran, but the mob of kids finally caught up with him, and he went down, hard, under a pileup of prepubescent boys. When the pileup dispersed, Ryan stayed down.
‘He’s hurt! He’s hurt!’
‘Get off him, he’s hurt!’
‘Ryan, what happened? Are you alright?’
‘I can’t move,’ groaned Ryan.
‘Someone get the nurse!’
The school nurse came out, made a cursory examination, talking to Ryan, and was obligated to call an ambulance. Ryan lay there, very still, complaining that he couldn’t move, but staying mostly silent. The bell rang. Recess was over. All of the kids retreated back to their respective classrooms. The EMS workers applied a metal or hard plastic neck brace, and slid a wooden board under his body. They strapped the child down and lifted the board onto a stretcher and pushed him into the ambulance. The doors shut. The sirens turned on, disturbing the classrooms. The teachers made no attempt to carry out their lessons now. The students were crowded at the windows, concerned; staring and waving ‘bye’ to Ryan. But the ambulance, which had driven out onto the school playground’s field, where we were playing and Ryan lay injured, got stuck in the mud. It would really be comical, if it wasn’t just sad. The rear wheels were sputtering and the vehicle wouldn’t move in forward or reverse. Ryan could have been dying in the back. Finally, after somebody placed thick sheets of cardboard underneath the tires, the ambulance got its tread back, and off they went, sirens blaring, to Norwalk Hospital. It was only a day before Ryan showed up to school again, wearing a Velcro neck brace. I think he wore it for a week. What did he think would happen if he made it to the emergency room? They’d take an x-ray, check reflexes, and do whatever had to be done to rule out paralysis or other serious injury. ‘What a prank!’ I thought.
One game we’d play at recess back in elementary school was reaching the most soaring height possible on the swing set and jumping off midair. Determined to outdo Ryan, I wanted to break a bone. I jumped and landed on my limbs. It hurt a very little bit, but I stayed on the ground. Ryan ran to get the recess monitor. At first she didn’t come. I stayed on the ground longer. Finally she came over.
‘I can’t move my arm,’ I told her.
‘Go to the nurse’s office,’ she said.
Ryan went with me, assisting me on the way, wanting to know what was wrong with his friend.
‘Is it broken?’ Ryan asked the nurse for me. Rushing the situation to fit his own selfish excitement and timeframe.
‘I don’t know,’ said the school nurse. Ryan was standing in the doorway of the office and I was seated on the bed. The nurse’s back was turned to us, as she was fishing out the right medical supplies from the white, metal and glass cabinet. She grabbed something, and then turned to face us.
‘Ryan, go back to class,’ she said.
‘See ya, Krane man,’ Ryan said to me, winking with only a slight (not noticeable to adults, I don’t think) smirk.
The nurse was impervious; unconvinced. There would be no hospitals, no x-rays, no calls to parents, no leaving school. She took the piece of fabric and wrapped my arm in it, slipping it over my shoulder and pinned it together. I wore the sling for only the remainder of the day.
Cut back to high school. Ryan was something of a star basketball player. I had since ceased to play sports competitively, but we still remained friends. I didn’t normally go to see him play. One Saturday morning, probably in junior high, when we were both playing in the rec league, our teams faced one another. I had a strong game, the best of my life. I almost outscored Ryan, which was a feat for any adolescent baller in New Canaan.
In high school, though, there was one game the New Canaan Rams varsity team was in where they were facing a rival. It may have been a regional or state championship, but I do not remember. I wasn’t at the game but I heard what happened right away. Ryan collapsed. He couldn’t breathe. The EMS guys were probably not far from the gymnasium, so they put him on oxygen, got him into an ambulance and rushed to Norwalk Hospital. The most grisly aspect of this event was that his parents were in the stands watching. They had to witness all this. Ryan’s parents followed the ambulance in their car and who knows what happened from there. Nobody knows what goes on behind a family’s closed doors. He was diagnosed that night with asthma. I knew it was phony. When he returned to school, all the girls said:
‘Are you alright, Ryan?’
‘Ryan, you poor thing!’
‘I heard what happened. It’s awful. Let me know if there’s anything I can do, Ryan.’
‘Welcome back, buddy!’ said the guys.
The other members of the varsity basketball team probably didn’t say anything to him. What did Ryan care? He carried that team. His season continued, I remember.
In the end of this whole behavioral epoch, I think I won the contest with Ryan. Perhaps in his mind, he won. It doesn’t matter. We both retired from the game with good reason, and without giving it a name.
Freshman year of attending New Canaan High School, I had become prone to hurt Abigail. I would play head games. Try to make her cry, and feel sorry when I succeeded. It was a cycle. I couldn’t help myself. I said she ‘smelled bad’ and ‘sweated too much’. This wasn’t true. I told her she spoke with a lisp, which she didn’t really (only a slight accent in her pronunciation of the letter ‘s’, and occasional, accidental emphasis on ‘th’). I said her nose was big, her teeth were big; that her forehead was big. They weren’t. She looked just like her mother and father, just like her brother. She was beautiful, nubile and elegant; slightly taller than me, with blonde hair and blue eyes and dimples when she smiled. I used to get mad at her because I said she wasn’t calling me enough. I needed to control her, make sure that I was the axis of her world. And she needed to be controlled. This came from her very dominant father who was always travelling internationally on business. Once, I used subliminal messaging to get her to throw me a surprise birthday party. It worked. I always wanted one, and it was always a dark secret of mine, how mine was forced. After about two years, I broke off the relationship. I did it: threw everything away, just to watch her react; just to hurt her. But I did not let go. I convinced Abigail to come over and, once and for all, officially give up her virginity to me (meaning actual intercourse); to consummate the relationship that was now coming to a close, which no matter what, will always be frozen in time as a testament to love.
‘It will give us closure,’ I told her.
I was 15, she was 14. During the foreplay, we lit candles and massaged one another with oil. This was for her—how she imagined her first time to be. But I never got the closure that I had promised her and myself. At first, I didn’t feel the loss. I felt free. But after some time, my heart began to ache with missing her. On the heels of our breakup, Abigail reported to me that Ryan had tried to ‘hook-up’ with her when they were innocently chatting, seated on a friend’s trampoline, at a party. I didn’t react. I was hurt, don’t get me wrong. Didn’t our friendship mean more than that? Wasn’t it an unspoken understanding that Abigail would forever be off limits to Ryan? But in the end it didn’t change anything between Ryan and me. She was free; I had set her that way. What could I do to stop him? Nevertheless, I started drifting apart from him, and her. Then I went to Saint Luke’s School.
One time, when we were at a friend’s house where there was never any adult supervision, I put Abigail into a ‘small package’. For those of you who don’t watch wrestling, this is where you bend the opponent’s legs over their head, pinning them. It hurt her. She cried. I apologized profusely, and felt really bad about it. Years later, I was on Kibbutz Yagur, just inland and perhaps a little south of Haifa. There were Canadian, American, Moldovan, French and Russian students of Hebrew and Zionism on the kibbutz. We were on a trip somewhere and traveling on a bus. When the bus was stopped at the destination and it was almost empty, I told this Sephardic girl, Elizabeth from California, ‘It would be so easy for us to fuck right now.’ It must have been an hour later when everyone was back on the bus, a Moldovan Jew who wore a cross around his neck, very tall, very broad, very athletic with blonde hair, walked up to me and gave me a good hard slap. It hurt. I was shocked. I held my face in place. I knew what it was for. And in retrospect, I had sexually harassed Elizabeth. I deserved it, I can admit that.
By sophomore year, Abigail had a new boyfriend. One night, I called her and manipulated my way into driving (I had just gotten my license) over to her house to hang out while her parents were out and she wasn’t with her new boyfriend. I came over and we kissed, standing up in her television room. I squeezed her ass in a demonstration of possession. I then insisted that she tell her new boyfriend that we had been together. She called me the next night crying, she had told him and he was angry at her. I listened to her cry over the phone, and attempted to console her. I missed her tears. I wished I could collect them in a dropper and release them, dripping them out onto my tongue, and for the satisfaction of my taste buds, drink them. But they did not break up. Abigail stayed with her new boyfriend, who was a year ahead of us in school, for about a year. I couldn’t help it, I missed her. As time went by, the regret for ending the relationship became worse. There was a dull pain in the pit of my stomach, always. Years later, when I was homeless in New Canaan, I sought her out. In my mind it was so perfect. She would rescue me from my fate on the streets and we would become adults together. We’d get married and have children, forever in love. I called her house daily from payphones and from the homeless shelter. Her mother always said she wasn’t home. This was during the summer and I knew that in the fall she’d be returning to school where she was studying Art History at a private college in southern California. Now, nearly two decades later, as I sat in my studio apartment in Brooklyn, thirty-seven-years-old, coming to terms with my own changes, I wondered if she had started her own family now, like the rest of our generation. I wondered what her children would look like; how she remembered me, whether she placed emphasis on the good or the bad. Did she even think of me still?