by Moshe Kasher
“If anyone asks you what yeshiva you go to,” my father would sign to us on our way to Borough Park for kosher pizza, “you just tell them it’s called Beth Jacob.”
Beth Jacob was the name of an Orthodox temple in Oakland and seemed plausible enough for my father to suggest as a name for a theoretical yeshiva. Yeshiva is the yiddish name for the seminary school that all young Jews go to. It’s the kind of place where kids spend ten hours a day studying Talmud and religious philosophy and an hour a day fulfilling the state’s legal requirements for “secular studies.” Every young Chassidic boy goes to yeshiva, and the thought of my father’s children going to public school with a filthy sea of non-Jews was unthinkable.
So he made up a lie for us to tell.
My brother, ever willing to dance the Jewish Uncle Tom shuffle, thought better of the name.
“Wait, don’t say Beth Jacob,” he signed. “We should say it in Yiddish, ‘Bais Yakov’; yeah, that’s better.”
“That’s great!” My father clapped David on the back “You are a genius!”
My brother nodded eagerly but I shuddered in fear. I knew I would fuck this up somehow. I envisioned some awful rabbi’s wife approaching me and asking, in the special grammar of the American Orthodox Jew, “So, nu, at what yeshiva do you learn?”
I knew I’d just sweat and piss my pants and scream, “I love black people!”
As it happened, reality was even more humiliating than my paranoid fantasies.
We went out to pizza and somehow, against all odds, the exact horror show we’d prepared for took place almost immediately. A nosy Jewish couple approached us, having met my father back in Sea Gate. They nasally whined some small talk before zeroing in for the kill.
They turned to me, their Jewish X-ray eyes searing into my secret soul. A single droplet of sweat beaded down my brow.
“So,” she asked, setting my skin on fire, “where do you two go to yeshiva?”
It happened. Worst Nightmare. Deep Shame.
My mouth opened but no sound came. I mouthed “Bais Yakov” but only to myself.
My brother pushed me aside and said confidently, “We go to Bais Yakov!”
My savior. I felt relief flood me. I nodded vigorously. My father smiled and nodded, too.
But something was wrong.
The lady looked confused. Her eyes scrunched up in disbelief. “Bais Yakov, the girls’ school?”
Panicked, I looked at my brother. He didn’t know what to do. Apparently there was a famous girls’ yeshiva in New York called Bais Yaakov. We hadn’t been briefed on this logistic possibility.
I turned to my father for answers but he was signing to his wife, pretending he hadn’t seen what just happened.
I turned back to the lady and whimpered. Then I peeled off my skin and handed it to them.
Actually they just wandered off, whispering to one another and shaking their heads.
I shuddered.
We all ate our pizza in silent shame.
When my father first moved to Sea Gate, I knew that perhaps I was a bit out of my religious league, and so one day, about a year before I started getting high, I decided to ask the rabbi for help with my religious crisis. It seemed perfectly logical at the time.
Rabbi Meisels was a good man and a genuinely loving proponent of Judaism, and when he heard I had a question about it, he happily piled me into his car, an American-made station wagon with wood paneling on the sides (much like every Chassidic Jewish family owned in Sea Gate at the time), put on his oversized plastic glasses, which faded from black at the top of the frame to clear plastic at the bottom (much like every Chassidic Jewish man wore in Sea Gate at the time), and off we went for a drive. We exited the gates of Sea Gate and drove off into the real world. We pulled into Borough Park, an extremely religious neighborhood of Brooklyn but, compared to Sea Gate, a secular state. People here had televisions they wouldn’t even bother hiding when company came over. That’s how shocking and scandalous things were in Borough Park. Who knows, if my father had chosen to live in Borough Park, I might’ve been able to latch on to Chassidic Judaism in some way and this book would be about the wonders of Chanukah instead. Borough Park was religious, but at least it was alive. The streets were littered with religious bookstores and kosher pizza parlors, burger joints called “Kosher Delight,” and if you looked hard enough, you could actually catch people smiling. Sea Gate was a trail of tears.
I turned to the rabbi and, my heart pounding, spit it out.
“Look,” I said, trying not to pass out as I revealed my religious weakness, “I have a hard time imagining myself in, like, the long run… um, you know, being a Jew. Or, sorry, not a Jew but like being religious.”
The rabbi stared at me like I was speaking Yiddish. Wait—no, like I was speaking Chinese.
I was falling all over myself as I tried to explain. “See, like, let’s take being Shomer Shabbos. I just wonder sometimes, am I going to be? You know what I mean? Like, am I going to be religious when I grow up? What should I do? I mean, I guess I’m just asking if I should be religious.”
Rabbi Meisels looked at me, confused. He stared for a few seconds and then looked ahead at the road and drove, in silence, for about five minutes. I squirmed in my seat, sure that he was going to drop me off at the gates of Hell. He finally spoke, “I don’t really know how to answer your question.”
I don’t begrudge Rabbi Meisels for being unable to help me with the most rudimentary of all religious questions, “Should I be religious?” The truth is, he was operating at such a high level of religiosity, questions like that never came up. If someone in the community ever said, “I’m not sure I believe this crap,” they would immediately be cast out and branded a heretic. It was only because I was essentially considered religiously brain dead that I was even allowed to get away with asking without social penalty.
You may see the fact that a rabbi couldn’t answer the question “Is Judaism a good religion to adhere to?” as a shocking irony, but consider the fact that the vast majority of questions he received from his congregation were more similar to, “If a candle is burning prior to Shabbos and I blow it out one second before Shabbos begins, but it somehow sparks back to life the second Shabbos comes in and my house will literally burn to the ground if I don’t blow it out, what should I do?”
Had I asked this question, Rabbi Meisels would have had a complex and thoughtful response to give. But unfortunately, my question was so outside of his worldview that he had no answer.
“What do you mean, you aren’t sure you are going to keep Shabbos?” I’m sure he thought. “Why, that’s a sin punishable by stoning death according to Mosaic law. Do you want to be stoned to death?”
That’s the world I was living in. Finally, as we pulled back into Sea Gate, he spoke again. “I don’t know how to help you with that. Maybe you should go ask the rabbi at Chabad.” Chabad again. The great fixer of problems in the Chassidic world.
Chabad had become sort of a clearinghouse for those kinds of problem situations. After the Holocaust, most Chassidic branches had retreated to an inward-looking social policy. Realizing the rest of the world to be filled with godlessness, they turned their focus from interactions with the world to an outright rejection of the world in the hopes of preserving the last fragments of holiness in the world. In other words, they stopped talking to regular people. Chabad was the only sect of Chassidism that still cared to interact with the real world or to help less-religious Jews in any way, which made them the go-to group for people like me. No one in the Chassidic world really cared for Chabad, their fanatic worship of the charismatic Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson smacking everyone’s sensitive spots as heretical. A mention of Chabad would often result in a sort of Yiddish-based eye rolling, but no one ever outright called them heretics, as they had become an indispensable liaison between the secular Jewish world (aka money) and the insular castle in the sky that most Chassidic sects had become. Even years later, when Schneerson finally died,
leaving his implicit promise to reveal himself as the Messiah unfulfilled, and most of his adherents declared that he would be resurrected and return to earth (sound like anyone you know?), most rabbis just kept silent and hoped Chabad would get their shit together.
Not fully aware of all this backstory but skeeved out by the residue it left on all of its adherents and their interactions, I decided that Chabad couldn’t help me. One too many rabbis, one too few answers. I ran into the house that afternoon, red-faced with the shame that someone in Sea Gate knew my deep secret, that perhaps I wasn’t cut out to be a rabbi after all.
“How was your meeting with Rabbi Meisels?” my father asked eagerly.
He loved the idea of me spending the day with the rabbi hashing out Talmudic treatises, talking about the Torah.
The truth is, despite all my father’s bravado, all of his antideaf protestations stemmed from a deep insecurity about his own deafness. He knew that he was missing much of the dialogue. He knew that people smiled at him in synagogue because they didn’t know how to talk to him like a regular man. He became, to them, a cartoon character, the deaf guy. My father took himself so seriously because no one else did. For all his strict adherence to Chassidic Judaism, my father didn’t read Hebrew, didn’t know Yiddish. He knew form and function but never got an opportunity to engage in the ultimate expression of Orthodox Judaism, the chance to study Jewish law. He was kept mostly ignorant and he knew it and it shamed him. So, when he had two hearing sons, he saw the opportunity for us to have what he and his other kids never would, the chance to be in on the dialogue. My perfect brother did just that, he learned how to be the scholar that Orthodox Judaism prizes above all. I just never could. I knew that and I was ashamed of it. It was just another thing that was wrong with me. I was only twelve and shame was starting to coil in me like a spring, creaking and gaining pressure, cranking down, winding me up, making me ready to pop.
So, when my father asked me how my meeting went with the rabbi, I just looked up and signed, “Great… It was great. I think I got the answers I was looking for.”
In a way, this was true. I eventually realized that the Burning Bush God I’d been looking for in the Torah had actually been growing on a bush in Northern California this whole time, waiting for me to burn.
Having been exposed to the joys of getting high and then having had them stripped away from me with a summer trip back to the old country, needless to say I was a bit miserable in New York. I needed something, so I had to content myself with gulping deeply when Shabbos wine was passed to me and indulging in late-night phone sex.
I’d found the joys of phone sex just before I’d left California in the summer of 1991. My mother had long since had a 900 number block placed on the phone line in some kind of preemptive psychic protection move. Luckily, the phone companies had arranged a neat work-around of those 900 blocks that I can’t imagine wasn’t a direct response to the plummeting profits that allowing parents to cut their children off phone sex had caused. If you can’t call 900 numbers, perhaps you can call an underdeveloped country? Small, far-off nations had long-distance arrangements to charge something like five dollars a minute for the connection. After the phone company took a ten-dollar connection fee, these beleaguered nations could start scraping money off the penises of American hornballs.
I called islands like Antigua and the Philippines and jerked my horny little dick to the sounds of their moans and dirty talk. I ejaculated to both Trinidad and Tobago. I brought rivers of cum to drought-addled islands. I e-JAH-culated onto Rastafarian marijuana fields.
I can imagine those ladies now, six kids in a small tin shack, stirring a goat curry stew with a baby on their hip as they cradled the phone on their shoulder, boredly moaning to me about how much they wanted my big cock. I didn’t yet have a big cock, but I was hardly going to tell them that.
I called every night. My father would ask me to bring him a cup of water and then ask me to rub his feet—a nonsexual but nonetheless extremely weird request. I felt more like a royal subject than anything else.
I’d wait until I heard snores to make sure everyone was asleep, and I would sneak down to the living room to call my tropical foreign queen.
Once, I called a number and got an older Filipino voice on the line. It sounded off. Like a grandmother’s voice.
“ ’Allo?” The huskiness of the voice threw me off, but my dick was hard and not to be deterred.
“I’m rock hard and ready for you,” I whispered, trying to sound of legal age to be making a call like this. Nothing like the squeaky pubescent creak of a thirteen-year-old voice to ruin a good tropical jerk session.
“Oh. Sarrdy. Sarrdy. No. I not do that kind of call.”
“You don’t what?” This was bullshit, I didn’t pay the $9.95 connection fee to be rejected by a woman saying sarrdy. I checked the number to make sure I hadn’t misdialed. I hadn’t. For some reason I decided to push the issue.
“C’mon, give it to me…” I panted, my voice cracking, revealing my youthful exuberance.
The reluctant phone whore spoke. “Oh, okay, you want puck me?”
I did. I really did. I’d never wanted to puck someone so bad.
Somehow, that grizzled old voice on the other end of the phone had melted a bit.
“Yes, that’s what I want; I want you to give it to me.”
And then, just like that, I had another tug session with an island lady.
To this day, I’m not sure if I convinced a random Filipino grandmother whom I’d misdialed to start a career in phone sex that day or if I pulled someone out of retirement for one last moan. All I know is that when the phone bill came, even that triumphant call wasn’t worth it.
My father called me into the kitchen and was holding a phone bill up like a subpoena. I was busted. I slunk into my chair and waited for the fire-and-brimstone lecture to begin. I realized I hadn’t thought this through.
“The phone bill is fifteen hundred dollars this month,” my dad sneered at me, his nostrils flaring, his rage just sorta bubbling beneath the surface. My dad had this way of getting so mad that you wished he would just hit you and get it over with. He was a master rager, and I took notes on his form. This might come in handy someday.
I slouched farther in my seat. “Yeah, sorry about that.”
My dad leaned into me and signed, “Phone sex?”
I shrugged. What could I do or say? My dad and the weight of the entire Jewish people were bearing down on me. I was fucked.
When I was eight days old, at my circumcision ceremony, Zeidi, then one hundred years old, held me in his gnarled hands and declared to my father and the Lord, “This boy will be a great rabbi, I can see into his soul.”
Thirteen years later I was explaining to my father how I’d racked up fifteen hundred dollars in bills while pumping my dick in his living room. Maybe Zeidi had been looking into someone else’s soul. Or maybe his soul-looking eyes had glaucoma. I’m not sure.
Conveniently, I had received approximately fifteen hundred dollars in Bar Mitzvah money from the complete strangers that my father had invited from the local Jewish community. I’d never had so much money in my life as that day after my Bar Mitzvah. But the day after the day after my Bar Mitzvah, it was liquidated on my penis.
I spent every penny of my Bar Mitzvah money on phone sex. I just imagined God, looking down at me, shaking his metaphorical head and asking me, “Phone sex? You spent your Bar Mitzvah money on phone sex? The holy rite I have commanded you to follow, you took and spent on calling ‘Hot Island Bitches’?”
Ashamed, I can hardly look God in his third, flaming eye. “Well, sorta. I mean, yes.”
God frowns. “This does not please me.”
“I’m the one who lost all that money,” I’d plead. “Anyway, isn’t this a passage into manhood? What better way to become a man than that?”
Beaten, God would mutter, “Well… I usually don’t cede to arguments as I am a being of omnipotent perfection, but that’s
a really good point.”
At least I tried to convince my dad that that’s how the conversation would go. My dad did not seem amused.
The rest of my trip to New York was spent awkwardly interacting with my family, longing for drugs or accented voices, and watching my stepmother lock the phone away at night. I tiptoed around the house but knew what they were all thinking: “Who is this pervert?” I couldn’t wait to get home to Oakland.
Chapter 6
“In My Neighborhood”
—Spice 1
I arrived back in Oakland with a sigh of relief and headed straight back to my stomping grounds. The guys were from all over North Oakland, but we hung out and terrorized a neighborhood called Rockridge. College Avenue. For years, it struggled to establish itself as the stuffy yuppie stronghold it has now finally become. If you go there today, you will see throngs of white people, doing white people things, such as inspecting rare cheeses and riding in packs of thousand-dollar bicycles with penis silhouette–enhancing spandex outfits. Vomit.
At the time, though, it was still in flux, and we did our best to ruin the yuppie dream. Rockridge sat where the rich Oakland Hills, the North Oakland killing fields, and the psychedelic wasteland of Telegraph Avenue buttressed up against each other—where worlds collided.
We were the local shitheads. You know those kids who get on the bus and you think to yourself, “Oh great, these fucking kids!”? That was us. Rockridge rats—shitty, loud, shoplifting, graffitiing thirteen-year-old menaces.
Officer Joe, the local beat cop in the neighborhood, hated us. At least six-foot-thirteen, with all of his body weight resting in his barrel chest, inside of which, I assume, were gears and clockwork cogs keeping a robotic pig’s heart pumping, he was a giant.
