by Meghan Daum
But like a lot of people immersed in subcultures, there’s an intangible gaff in many of the Ravenhearts’s perceptions, an imbalance that comes not, as one might assume, from spending more time reading science fiction and fantasy than, say, the newspaper, but from what appears to be a desperate need to compensate for their adolescent nerdiness. Most Ravenhearts talk a lot about feeling alienated in high school. There’s much said about being misunderstood. “I wasn’t very well socialized,” says Morning Glory. “I used to go out into the yard with a flashlight and try to signal the flying saucers to come get me and take me home,” Oberon says. “I was a geeky kid,” Wolf says. “I didn’t lose my virginity until a month before my eighteenth birthday.”
Inherent in the belief that one is alienated and “not like the others” is the equally ardent belief that no one anywhere, except perhaps the members of the subculture with which the alienated person has chosen to affiliate himself, has ever had the same feelings. In order to feel truly alienated one must keep a safe distance from the fact that, as self-concepts go, “not like the others” is fairly standard. This distance leads to the kind of mentality that regards the loss of virginity at age eighteen as a freakish thing. It makes a person inclined, as at least two of the Ravenhearts are, to credit the high school drama club—that haven for “misfits” and “outsiders”—with their deliverance into the socialized American teenager-hood. The need to be different means we must constantly promote our unusualness. Oberon tells me he was telepathic until he was two and that he is the reincarnation of his own grandfather. Wolf sometimes bites people.
This is where the Ravenhearts lose me. It’s not their polyamory I have a problem with. It’s their forced iconoclasm. It’s their paraphernalia. It’s the fact that they don’t seem to sleep with anyone who isn’t just like them. The result is that too often “deeply connecting” seems more a matter of shared membership in a subculture—a subculture that is based around the premise of “not fitting in” and has an entire system of toys and tchotchkes and T-shirts to consumerize the idea of not fitting in—than it does with actually connecting.
But despite their heavy involvement in their subculture, the Ravenhearts make a big point of saying that, at root, they’re no different from most people. Many polys believe Bill and Hillary Clinton to be polyamorous. “She knows he has other lovers and she ultimately doesn’t care,” says Wolf. “They’re just not in a position to be open about it.”
The Ravenhearts pride themselves on their openness. They say they give interviews because they’re one of the few poly families who are in a position to be public. Presumably, that position is one of total immersion in the neo-pagan world, a place where, according to them, “diversity is celebrated” and “all forms of relationships and sexual orientations are honored.” Here they are immune from the kind of hostility they might elicit if, for instance, they were polyamorous but had names like Steve and Joan and Margaret, and spent their weekends skiing rather than attending the Ancient Ways Festival.
But I would surmise that persecution is not the greatest fear. The greatest fear is of losing the stranger in the strange land. The fear is that “the lifestyle,” when it’s stripped of its filigrees, will look less like a lifestyle than a human condition, much like being gay or having a tendency to sunburn easily. That’s because there’s really nothing very strange at all about polyamory. A whole lot of people, in one way or another, participate in it without their friends and neighbors knowing or really caring. The fact that I am interviewing the Ravenhearts and not any of the thousands of other people in this country who probably practice polyamory without knowing there’s a name for it says less about our culture’s obsession with sex than it does about our obsession with labels. I am interviewing the Ravenhearts because they’ve given themselves a name, because they have a Web site and a religion and a family business and have decided to incorporate their polyamory into a larger aura of personal style. The Ravenhearts invented a word for this arrangement and have spent the better part of their lives marketing their invention. Ultimately, this story is not about people who have sex with anyone they want. This story is about what happens when you give something a name and, in so doing, deny yourself the unexpected elation that comes from falling in love with someone whose bookshelves hold none of the same books as your own.
AMERICAN SHIKSA
I was born just another blonde. I hunted for Easter eggs. I decorated trees and ate ham. Like all women of the Protestant tradition I was raised to smile, to cooperate and “help out.” I made pot holders and read books on cake decorating. I jumped rope and played hopscotch under vast azure skies. But when adolescence struck something strange happened. Instead of becoming a woman, I became a shiksa. I skipped over the typical stuff, the horses and Love’s Baby Soft perfume, and went right for the throat. I just didn’t have much taste for those praying quarterbacks, those hunks in blue satin choir robes, the hulking social drinkers, the swaggering lifeguards and stockbrokers, the good old boys from the verdant athletic fields of my youth. I discovered Jewish men like I discovered books: in the library, tucked away in the dark corners of suburbia, reticent and wise and spouting out words I had to look up in the dictionary. Unlike Christian men with their innate sense of entitlement, with their height and freckles and stamp collections and summer Dairy Queen jobs, all those homages to the genetics and accoutrements of Western civilization, Jewish men were rife with ambiguity, buzzing with edge. Their sports were cognitive, their affection seemingly cerebral. They were so smart that they managed to convince girls like me that they liked me for my brain, that even though I was a shiksa, even though I had been deprived of Hebrew school and intense dinner debates about the Palestinian Question, I was a smart girl. A Jewish man knows this is the way to get to a woman. A shiksa likes to think that she’s intelligent, even though she’s bad at math, even though she had to take remedial chemistry with the drug addicts and the pregnant girls. But the Jewish man is cunning in his sensitivity. He zooms in on our insecurities and tells us we’re “insightful,” that we’re “real.” He wins because for many of us, insight and reality have always been afterthoughts, the quintessential backseat passengers to that driver blondeness. The evolution from blonde girl to shiksa means discovering the exoticism inherent in her blandness. It is to be a foreigner in an utterly American way.
Herein began a life of loving Jews, of having a crush on the Alex Reiger character on Taxi, of preferring Bernstein to Woodward, of deciding that I was naturally neurotic, that angst flattered me, that I was smarter than my blonde counterparts, that I was funnier than my parents, that I was among the “other” chosen. Ten years after I won my first Easter egg hunt, I found myself face-to-face with a grand and brooding destiny, with dark-haired boys who read books and stayed up late, who had circles under their eyes, who looked like wise men, like owls perched on the highest rungs of the evolutionary ladder. These were the boys who, in college, combined their pot with wheat germ, who lent you their paperback of the Kama Sutra but asked you not to break the binding. Indeed, this is the allure of the Jewish man: His deviance is too self-conscious to be dangerous. He’s a scoundrel but he won’t kill you on his motorcycle. He’s a molester but not a drunk, a pervert but not a thug.
The first symptom of this infatuation was a desire to be an actual Jew. I yearned for a richer culture, for better debating skills and hair with personality. I was jealous of my Jewish female friends, who never needed to use hot rollers and seemed to know every single person on the East Coast. But my fantasy that I would one morning wake up a Jew soon faded. Even if I converted, the roots were too deep, the culture too personal. Besides, I’m an agnostic, which is a trait only acceptable in natural-born Jews. So I decided that if I couldn’t be Jewish I might as well be un-Jewish in as obstreperous and maddening a way as possible. I decided to promote myself by advertising all that I was not. And that meant surrounding myself with Jews and being a gentile. Blonde. Flaky. Adoring.
I soon decided it
was my fate—my responsibility, in fact—to surround myself with Jews and eventually marry a Jewish man. I owed it to myself, and even more intensely I owed it to my ancestors, who, in my imagination, had toiled in cultural mediocrity for years, laboring in midwestern farmlands, developing tractor tans, feeding castor oil to cussing kids, shooting rifles straight into the air when there was nothing on TV, doing all those things that are so conspicuously not Jewish.
The dirty secret of goyim everywhere, even those from the highest circles of what the Ralph Lauren home collection would be if it hadn’t been the brainchild of a Jew, is that deep inside we’re all white trash. Even those who hide behind the cultural cachet of Catholicism or WASPdom know that the distance between Jackie Kennedy and Tonya Harding is just a few rungs on a very rickety ladder. With or without country homes in Kennebunkport or Squibnocket, we’re all descendants of shotgun culture, of Coke at breakfast, Triscuits for lunch, 4-H champions, horse thieves, and drunks passed out in front of 60 Minutes. I myself am the daughter of a former Miss Congeniality. Cuckoo clocks have played a role in my childhood. Tornadoes have been of legitimate concern. I am an American. And we in America know about Jews. We know what we want.
One of the first Jewish men I knew had asked his previous girlfriend to perform fellatio on him while he was driving, but since, being Jewish, he also feared getting into an accident, he suggested that they do this while cruising at fifteen miles per hour around an empty parking lot. During my tenure, I was asked to read aloud from Portnoy’s Complaint during a car trip from New York to Boston (this he could handle at sixty-five mph). I had never read the book. I had, in fact, confused it somehow with Roger’s Version and as my lips passed over the pages I wondered when we were going to get to the part about Jesus Christ.
This boy was smart and adorable, a chronic allergy sufferer from Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. He spoke a broken Yiddish. He carried an inhaler of Proventil with him at all times. I was not his girlfriend, merely his backdoor shiksa, a role which suited me fine as I was not interested in full-time motherhood, merely the maid service for which shiksas are so well-known (and well tipped). He told me about his other girlfriends, shiksas of all varieties—black, Asian, Mennonite—whom he invited as guests for Passover seders, after which he would take them to Coney Island and screw them on the sand. I would nod and laugh, even saying “That’s interesting,” a phrase used often by shiksas when they can’t keep up with the conversation. Unlike the Jewish woman, the shiksa is the consummate “other woman.” She knows she’s not the only one and until she closes the deal by marrying him (extra points for church weddings, even Unitarian), she doesn’t care. Her role is not to judge but to conspire, not to bitch but merely moan. Unlike the Jewish woman, who’s been raised to have a modicum of pride and certainly wouldn’t ruin her hair by doing it on a schmutzy beach, the shiksa probably has sand in her hair anyway.
Ask the Jewish man why he loves the shiksa and the same words always come to his above-average mind: “pliant,” “gentle,” “breezy.” The shiksa is famous for her infinitely bearable lightness. She doesn’t boss around handymen. She doesn’t talk about her shrink. She doesn’t complain about the food in restaurants—she can’t tell the difference anyway, having grown up on Green Giant creamed corn. Her primary pose is an embarrassed hand-on-mouth. “Oh, I can’t believe I said that,” she says without saying anything. Indeed, she often says nothing, which doesn’t mean that she has nothing to say, merely that she chooses not to say it. The most brilliant shiksas consider their brains in the same light that they consider their outfits; the old adage “get completely dressed, then take off one piece of jewelry” also applies to the art of conversation. So, she will conjure quite a number of thoughts and offer up only a few, one of which is commonly “Another gin and tonic, please.” Like a squirrel gathering acorns she doesn’t blow her wad. She lets her Jewish man do most of the talking, thereby securing her position as his number-one dream lay.
Ask us shiksas why we love the Jew and we can come up with at least three reasons but will only dole out two of them: “on time,” and “less likely to have a criminal record.” The thing we thought but did not say is that other than a professional athlete or a movie star, a Jewish man is the closest a woman can come to having a trophy. To date a Jewish man is to tease him away from his tribe for a while. To marry a Jewish man is to get him to turn his back on the essence of his entire existence—his bar mitzvah photos, his SAT scores, his mother. It is to get him to admit that he loves us so much that he’ll trade in scholarship for marshmallow fluff, substitute the Torah for a spanking new set of World Book Encyclopedias. In exchange he can mouth off all he wants and we won’t interrupt him. The dynamic between shiksas and the Jewish men who love them is that of dolphin to marine biologist. His intelligence is solid and studied. He’s walking rigor. He’s done the work. We, on the other hand, have remarkable reasoning powers but prefer to squeak. We splash around in the water. We enjoy balancing things on our noses. (I myself can hang a spoon off my nose.) We’re the attraction, the on-air talent. He’s the writer/producer/director. We’re Kate Capshaw. He’s Steven Spielberg—after he’s dumped Amy Irving (not our fault).
Another of my Jewish boyfriends proclaimed my lack of Jewishness as proudly as he once sang “Hatikvah” in Hebrew school. His affection spewed out in torrents as if he were an open hydrant. He was kind and reliable and only ordered Cokes in bars. He told me the meanings of words. He filled me in on current events. He cooperated when I insisted that we see both Beethoven and Free Willy movies the day they opened in theaters. When we rented Schindler’s List he patiently stopped the tape to explain to me what was happening. He professed his love to me on a daily basis. He loved my shiksadom, and insisted that his family could learn to love it too. Despite being expected to call them almost daily, he claimed to have “a very mature relationship” with his parents, one in which their parental love subsumed their dismay at his taste for shiksas and they accepted him, as parents accept a retarded child, for who he was.
This claim did not prevent him from, inexplicably, loving me with considerably less verve during weekends when he took me home for family visits. Within hours of our arrival he would suddenly contract a case of food, sun, or allergy medicine poisoning and be forced to go upstairs and lie down, leaving me to fend for myself. Little did he know that while he slept, knocked out on Benadryl or burned by the fierce Jersey shore sun, his parents schemed against him. For this is the scenario in which all Jewish parents, having apparently attended the same lecture at the synagogue called “Booting the Blonde: How to Get that Shiksa Out of Your Precious, Brilliant Son’s Life for Good,” behave identically. This is when they get out the photographs of trips to Israel and make a big deal about recent editorial changes in The Jewish Weekly. This is when they get out IRA portfolios and pore over them as if they were the original manuscript of Ulysses. They show the shiksa photographs from their son’s bar mitzvah, cleverly trying to drive her away by showing her what a dork he looked like in a yarmulke. They talk about what an ugly baby he was, hoping to discourage her from producing equally hideous offspring. They unabashedly discuss bodily functions, cruelly alienating the shiksa because they all know that her family doesn’t have bodily functions. At this the shiksa can merely sit there and say “That’s interesting,” all the while dreaming of a juicy hunk of Boar’s Head.
I’ve dated some non-Jews, men whose chief bodily functions involved the passage of Scotch down the esophagus, men who haven’t noticed that they still have a poster of Wayne Gretsky on their wall. I went on a date with a Protestant from Minnesota who told me he dropped out of library science school “because it was too stressful.” I went on a date with a lapsed Catholic who got up to use the men’s room and passed out on the floor. He later explained that he’d “had a few cocktails in the hours preceding our date.” It turned out this was eight hours and these cocktails were the sort rarely if ever consumed by Jewish men. Blue drinks. Drinks with swizzle sticks s
haped like monkeys.
“The Monkey looks like a child trying to master a multiplication problem,” Portnoy intoned. “But not a dumb child, Not stupid at all!” This is not the swizzle stick monkey but the shiksa, whose desire for the Jewish man to think she’s smart is equal to the Jewish woman’s desire to hear him say, “Funny, you don’t look Jewish.” The appearance of a raw braininess is the shiksa’s ultimate goal, the final frontier of “otherness” as it manifests in her so un-other world. The shiksa needs the Jewish man because without him she cannot exist. Without him she is just another blonde girl. And the shiksa is blonde even when she isn’t blonde. Imposed on her world is a perpetual weary sunshine, gleaming rays reflected from Christ’s own well-flossed teeth. Yellow light surrounds her; she seems bathed in Parkay margarine. She has much to overcome. She must do her homework. She must try to get through at least some of the New York Times front section before turning to the Styles section. She must subtly manipulate her Jewish man into eating an occasional Cheez Whiz treat, into buying a Christmas tree. She must avoid being stabbed by Norman Mailer. She must avoid engaging women like Susan Sontag in philosophical debate—at this, as in arguments with any Barnard graduate, the shiksa will lose. The shiksa simply must know her place at the seder table. She must help clean up afterwards. She must try to stay sober. She must send the kids to Hebrew school as long as they also twirl the baton. Moreover she must learn to pronounce charoset as well as eat it. It tastes like an hors d’oeuvre in purgatory, but she’ll suffer. Yes, she’ll suffer, too.
MUSIC IS MY BAG
The image I want to get across is that of the fifteen-year-old boy with the beginning traces of a mustache who hangs out in the band room after school playing the opening bars of a Billy Joel song on the piano. This is the kid who, in the interests of adopting some semblance of personal style, wears a fedora hat and a scarf with a black-and-white design of a piano keyboard. This is the kid who, in addition to having taught himself some tunes from the Songs from the Attic sheet music he bought at the local Sam Ash, probably also plays the trombone in the marching band, and experienced a seminal moment one afternoon as he vaguely flirted with a not-yet-kissed, clarinet-playing girl, a girl who is none too popular but whose propensity for leaning on the piano as the boy plays the opening chords of “Captain Jack” give him a clue as to the social possibilities that might be afforded him via the marching band.
