by Moshe Kasher
As soon as they married, my father found the order he’d been looking for, the order he remembered. The 613 laws of the Torah explained everything to him, kept him whole, kept his volatility in check.
Now my father wasn’t exactly a full-on Satmar Chassid. To be that, he would have had to dive into the deepest of deep pools of religiosity. He was more like an affiliate. Like a fella who does work for the Mafia but isn’t a made guy. Regardless, my father quickly became a very, very religious man. He put down his paintbrushes and never touched them again, his artistic desires sated by religion. Or who knows, maybe his spiritual needs were just being fulfilled by painting while they waited for the Torah. All I really know is my dad turned into a Chassid.
And so six weeks a year I would have to become a Chassid myself.
My father drove me straight from LaGuardia Airport to the Chassidic Jewish barber in the Borough Park district of Brooklyn and plopped me in front of him with a look that said, “Fix this.” The fat Russian Gulag barber looked at my head with disgust.
“Why you cut off your payos?” he asked, contempt in his voice.
Payos, the Chassidic side locks, are very important to the Satmars. It’s through those wacky sideburns that God is made aware of how abjectly devoted you are to him. I mean, you are willing to make yourself look completely ridiculous for him. This pleases the Lord.
“I’m sorry,” I explained to the complete stranger/barber. “You see, my family is in a complex religiosocial situation. In my mother’s household, I’m mostly secular, thus the payos make little sense. But when I come to New York, I feel a deep shame that I’m not aesthetically pleasing to you, a bewarted pogrom survivor that I’ve never met before, and the rest of your judgmental ilk.”
Actually what happened is, I’d mutter, “Dunno,” through red-faced shame and wait for my spiritually painful haircut to be over and to receive the closest approximation of a biblical hero hairdo possible from my California bowl cut.
Then we’d jump back in the car and drive to Sea Gate, my hell away from home. If you get off the F train at the last possible stop and then walk past all the Coney Island fun and past all the people of color (yikes!) and through a gate, then through a time portal to pre-Nazi Europe, you get to Sea Gate. A little shtetl in Brooklyn. There I lived among first-language Yiddish speakers who, despite their families having been in America since the 1930s, spoke with European accents. They never spoke to anyone who was not Jewish. I, Moshe Kasher, was as close to a non-Jew as any of them had ever met. They pleasure-read in Yiddish. I didn’t even know the Hebrew alphabet.
Sea Gate was a citadel of isolation, a strange village of identical penguins waddling around, looking busy. Chassids are always busy. No matter what, they are in a hurry. I was a secular kid from laid-back California, takin’ it slow. Of course, that was when I wasn’t freaking out with angry temper tantrums. Everyone looked and acted the same, and thus, I stuck out, hard. Around me swirled the world of the ultrareligious, and I tried desperately to stay on the ride, to look cool and collected, to not scream with difference. I tried to make friends.
In Sea Gate, the Ultra-Orthodox kids and the really religious kids played dodgeball games. Essentially, English speakers versus dead-language enthusiasts. The pasty old-worlders should have been rather easy to bean, as their legs were slightly atrophied from years of study in the yeshiva by day and high-chicken-fat meals by night.
This is the part of the story where I’m supposed to become a local hero because my secular sports skills made us neighborhood champs. But I was chubby and out of shape. I got winded and then I got blasted by the ball while cries of “Hit the goy!” reverberated in my mind.
Somewhere around that time I found a well of fear to jump into. I felt so different, I ached. I’d been in therapy for years at that point and I was only seven; I just knew something was fundamentally wrong with me. I became obsessed with the fear that someone would figure all of this out and expose me for the broken piece of human machinery that I was. I was terrified of everything. My feral snarling slowly started to give way to a pool of fear. I transitioned smoothly between angry out-of-control kid into frightened out-of-control kid. I was seven years old and I was sure I was shit.
My father didn’t help much. When he saw how lost I was in Sea Gate, he sent me to a Chabad (another, slightly more user-friendly sect of Chassidism) day camp to “learn the ropes” of Chassidic Judaism. This is the equivalent of sending your illiterate, developmentally disabled child to Yale rather than Harvard and grinning at the concession you’ve made. He just didn’t get it.
“Don’t worry about the kids making fun of you, just act like you know what you are doing.”
“But Dad, I don’t know what I’m doing. I can’t pray in Hebrew, if I don’t know Hebrew,” I’d shoot back, hoping against all odds that logic could save me from another day of mouthing along to Hebrew prayers, my prayer book upside down, hoping no one noticed I wasn’t saying anything at all.
“I don’t know how to be hearing either, but I fool people every day. You just act Jewish like I act hearing.”
My dad had a kind of pet obsession with how “undeaf” he appeared to be. Until the day he died, he was convinced—no matter how many times his questions and queries were answered with “Huh?”—that he was fooling them; that despite his mangled Charlie Brown’s teacher voice, no one ever noticed he couldn’t hear.
He always had a sort of odd resentment toward the deaf community, rolling his eyes at the sincerity of its struggles for equality. They were, to him, more or less naive bumpkins who wished they could be as smart as he was. Yes, he was deaf, but he wasn’t deaf like that. He considered himself above essentially every deaf person in the world. My king-like father had a king’s ego, too. One of his favorite jokes was to hold his face in shock when he looked in the mirror and scream, “I’m beautiful!”
Well, he sort of was beautiful. At least his wives thought so. While I had been in Oakland, my father had been busy. I met my two new siblings on my first visit back to New York. My brother Aron and my sister Hinda were born in quick succession after my father and Betty had married. They were respectively three and four years younger than I, and both deaf. I was, at this point, essentially surrounded by deaf family. My brother and grandmother were the only hearing people I knew. Your normal was my abnormal. I spent my early childhood being “not quite.” I was Jewish, but not quite. I was hearing, but not quite. I belonged in my family, but not quite. However, back in Oakland, I was quite white.
To most of the students in the Oakland Public School System, I was white boy. That was my nickname at school. Well, to be fair, that wasn’t my nickname, it was our nickname. I and every other white male student, and there weren’t very many, shared the well-thought-out, hypercreative moniker: white boy. That was on the good days. On the bad days, when things weren’t going as well at home for my black buddy, or maybe because I was being just a little too white, I became honky or cracker or white bread or white chicken bread or bitch.
I tried calling a kid nigger once. Once. I was in third grade and was fighting with a kid named Darryl, who was yelling out a rapid-fire machine-gun assault of:
Honkycrackerwhitebreadwhitechickenbreadbitch!
Honkycrackerwhitebreadwhitechickenbreadbitch!
Honkycrackerwhitebreadwhitechickenbreadbitch!
So I got mad. A man’s not perfect, especially when he’s a boy. It seemed only fair at this point for me to let loose the rumbling slur from the recesses of my nonexistent Confederate roots. Nigger. All activity stopped.
Darryl’s face fell; he looked more sad than mad.
“You can’t say that, dog. You’ll get killed!” Darryl seemed to be warning me more than he was threatening me.
“But what about all that honkycrackerwhitebreadwhitechickenbreadbitch stuff?” I asked, confused.
Darryl welled up with compassion and he explained the rules to me.
“That’s different,” he said. “You’re white.”
Then he punched me in the stomach.
“I guess that’s true,” I admitted, groaning in pain.
I felt like shit and slumped off the playground, determined that I’d rather be a honkycrackerwhitebreadwhitechickenbreadbitch than a racist bitch. So that was my first and last time calling someone a nigger.
Later, when I became black, I would often call people nigga, but that was affectionate and a reclamation of the word. Actually, technically it was a re-reclamation of the word, as it had already been reclaimed by actual black people. My people, whites who wished they were black, then re-reclaimed it from them and used it among ourselves, proving that white people could use the word in a cool, friendly way.
Speaking of words, it was around then that I figured out what my main and only weapon would be from that point out. My big fat mouth. I slowly started sharpening my tongue on the whetstone of Oakland Public Schools. If I couldn’t win all the fights, I’d certainly win all the rounds of verbal sparring. People fucked with me so I learned how to fuck right back. I started to hone the questionable skill set of the class clown. In short, I became an asshole.
I met Richard Lilly in first grade. He was one of the only white kids in my class, and we became best friends instantly. How kids become friends in that personality-less time in their lives is beyond me. What did we find in common?
“Hey, I have an incredibly small white penis; do you?”
Somehow we forged a connection and were inseparable from then on. Maybe our connection was subconscious. His family was as fucked up as mine, but we never talked about it like that.
Richard lived with his grandmother, too. His dad was an alcoholic, his mother was a crackhead prostitute. We were two deeply troubled white kids trying to keep our heads above water.
Richard’s dad was that kind of handlebar-mustached, fluffy-haired, Cadillac alcoholic who would drive us around, smoking with the windows up as we gagged and coughed, overdramatizing our disdain for smoke just like the antismoking campaigns at school had taught us to.
“I’m literally dying back here,” Richard choked, grabbing his throat, his tongue lolling out the side of his mouth.
“You kids shut it, or we don’t get dinner tonight.”
We shut it.
We stopped by a transient hotel on Martin Luther King Street in West Oakland, and Mr. Lilly turned to us with a smoking cigarette butt hanging from his lip. “Wait here.”
He got out of the car and crossed the street to a strung-out blonde in a miniskirt who was pacing back and forth like she was in a hurry, but she clearly had nowhere to be.
“That’s my mom,” Richard said flatly. I could tell questions were out of the question.
I peered across the street to see Richard’s dad yelling at her. Richard turned red. I watched as his dad pulled out his wallet and handed her some cash, which she snatched and then scurried away. Then we went to McDonald’s.
Richard never quite got around to telling me about how his mother’s life affected him, but in retrospect, I realize it played out in his antidrug bravado. He was the poster D.A.R.E. child—he drank the antidrug Kool-Aid and preached the gospel. A success case.
“I think drugs are disgusting and I’m never fucking doing them,” he told me out of nowhere, under the covers at a sleepover later that night. I nodded and suggested we throw things at cars from his grandmother’s balcony.
We collected eggs and oranges from his kitchen and crouched behind the balcony, hurling stuff at cars as they drove by, him with increasing ferocity, me with my best friend’s interests at heart.
Chapter 3
“Get In Where You Fit In”
—Too $hort
Oakland in the mid-eighties was a very interesting place to be white. The real murderfest was just about to begin there, and East Bay gangster rap was about to hit. In a few years, rappers like Too $hort, Spice One, Tupac, E40, and the Dangerous Crew would become my mentors, my Eckhart Tolle, my Rilke. Rather than The Power of Now, I would study the power of Freaky Tales, the filthy anthem of Too $hort explaining the ins and outs of male-female love relations:
“I knew this girl, her name was Tina, bitch so dumb we named her misdemeanor. Cuz it had to be a crime to be that dumb, I took her to the house and she let me cum in her mouth.”
So my mother and grandmother hated men, and my philosopher kings and mentors hated women. With no one left not to hate, I spent my early years reading Gloria Steinem while imagining ejaculating on women’s faces in disdain.
Of course, I never would have been allowed to listen to Too $hort when I was eight and nine years old had my mother not been deaf. Luckily she was, though, so for all she knew, I was listening to Brahms.
Richard would sneak over and he, my brother, and I would blare X-rated rap albums with my mother in the room, unaware of a thing, often turning to us and exclaiming, “I can feel the bass, I love it!”
We grinned as Too $hort explained how Nancy Reagan had given him a blow job:
“She licked my dick, up and down, like it was corn on the cob.”
“I like the bass, too, Mom,” I’d snicker.
Those songs were how I learned about the birds and the bees. Or rather, they were what I chose to listen to. In typical Bay Area hippie mother fashion, my mother was hardly shy about teaching us about sex. The harsh “we don’t talk about that” boundaries of the 1950s were supplanted by porous, “I’m your buddy” parenting. I’m not saying I would have preferred an emotionally distant mother who never told me anything about sex other than that masturbating would make hair grow over your eyes and make you go blind, but it would have been nice to have had it as an option. My mother would be much more likely to cheer me on if she caught me jerking off, delightedly signing, “It’s natural!” as I came.
Tuesdays were sex talk nights. Every horrid Tuesday, my mother would call my brother and me away from whatever we were doing and gather us for a humiliation session.
“Boys, come in here!” my mother would yell from the kitchen.
We’d run in breathless, hoping for something cool.
Shit. The blue book.
Boys and Sex was the name of the blue-covered manual from which my mother would read to us. For hours every Tuesday, we would pray for comets to hit the house and take us out of our misery as my mother droned on about “orgasms” and “rectal insertion.” As she talked, our disgust turned to a buzzing sleepiness. Somehow, she took all the fun out of it. Never has a nine-year-old been so thoroughly bored by sex.
At the end of every chat was the same question, “Are either of you gay?” If there is such a thing as being too supportive of homosexuality, my mother had it. We got the distinct impression that not only would it be okay if we were gay, it would be preferred.
“Are either of you gay?”
“No, Mom,” we’d explain again, “we still aren’t fucking gay.”
Swearing around my mother was nothing but a thing to us. We’d just wipe at our faces like we were dabbing barbecue sauce away and mutter the F word from behind the veil of our hands. If she didn’t see it, she didn’t know it happened. Mostly we did this for each other, to see how many swear words we could add into our conversations without being caught. My mom had some kind of preternatural ability to know when we were doing this, though. She was like the blind superhero Daredevil whose other senses were heightened when he went blind. But rather than using her powers to lock up criminals, my mother used hers to bust us when we were being assholes.
“David does like sucking an occasional dick, though.” I laughed from behind the back of my hand.
My brother and mother slapped me at the same time.
“Stop with the cussing-behind-your-hands crap.” My mom was about to begin a familiar admonishment.
“Being gay isn’t funny. It’s not a joke. It’s just like me being deaf. Would you like it if people laughed at me for being deaf?”
“No, Mom,” we’d repeat as one, “we wouldn’t.”
�
�Now”—she’d settle back in—“are either of you gay?”
“No, Mom, we aren’t,” we’d chant, “but we wish we were.”
It was at this point that I’d just zone out and stop listening. I would transcendentally leave my body and float to East Oakland and imagine Too $hort telling me all about pussy. Now that’s sex ed.
I learned to jerk off, too. A couple of years after my mother first cracked the blue book, I got my hands on a copy of Jim Carroll’s The Basketball Diaries. In it, I read about how he would steal away to his hot New York roof and stare at the silhouette of his neighbor’s body while he played with his dick in bliss. Up until that point, despite all the long-winded lectures from my mom, I thought masturbation, or “touching yourself,” was when you put your hand down your pants while watching TV, à la Al Bundy. But I could sense, in my reading of the passage in The Basketball Diaries, that he was doing something different and I studied it carefully, again and again, until I found that ancient bit of limbic, instinctive wisdom that tells man to constrict his hand into the shape of a vagina. I stole away to the bathroom for hours daily to try my new trick. I was eleven years old and unaware that there was such a thing as ejaculating. Quite happy with the sensations I’d found from using my new “pussy hand,” I’d simply lube up and jerk off for a while and then pack my little dick back in my pants and go on about my day, awaiting the next time me and me could be alone together again.
Richard was kept apprised of all these sessions as he had recently learned the wisdom of the “tube hand” as well. We would talk on the phone about different techniques. It was very gay, which would have made my mother proud, but we were too young to know it so it hardly counted.
