19 Love Songs

by David Levithan

  TRACK SIXTEEN

  The Hold

  1.

  To me, Jewish isn’t matzoh ball soup, it’s lighting the candles. My grandmothers lighting the candles. My mother lighting the candles, ushering in the flames. My grandfather joined the New York Police Department as soon as they let Jews take the entrance exam. Jewish is changing the course of your life to prove that particular point. Jewish is being the exception to Christmas. My best friend (for a time) in high school had a Hanukkah bush. I told him, “That’s a Christmas tree.” He said, “No, it’s a Hanukkah bush.” I told him that in order to be a Hanukkah bush, it would have to be burning, exclusively fueled by a single drop of oil. Jewish is both having a Hanukkah bush and making fun of Hanukkah bushes. It’s also spelling Chanukah any damn way you please. I like a C in there, but not when referencing Hanukkah bushes, because they don’t exist. This is, I understand, a possibly wicked-son thing to say. Jewish is knowing once a year your family will rate your behavior and slot you into one of four sons at the Seder. I never wanted to be the one unable to speak, because he didn’t have any good lines. The wise one seemed holier than thou, and while I often felt holier than thou, it was never in an actual God Loves Me More context. So basically, I campaigned for the wicked son. Let me be the doubter. Jewish is doubting, because Jewish is being screwed over by authority time and time again. (Dayenu.) I’ve never asked my brother if he wanted to be the wicked son. I feel my biggest competition was my cousins. We were all oldest sons. We all wanted to be the wicked doubter. I wonder what Rabbi Akiva would make of that. Jewish is knowing all the names but not remembering exactly who they were or what they did. (I know Elijah comes to the door. BUT WHY?) Jewish is six years of Hebrew school, six years of halfhearted attempts at learning the language and children’s Shabbat services where the cantor would strum his guitar. For a while, I thought all prayers were Soft Rock. Hebrew school created an alternate universe from real school, and in this alternate universe, all the other kids were Jewish and knew the difference between a borei pri hagafen and a motzi lechem min ha’aretz. Later I’d go to camp with kids from Hebrew school and go to college with kids from Hebrew school and bump into kids from Hebrew school on the sidewalks of New York City; we don’t remember the names of all of Jacob’s sons, but we do remember each other. I can still read Hebrew. As long as there are vowels. As long as you don’t ask me what it means. As a writer, I respect that God’s name is unpronounceable. That makes sense. Jewish is giving words their worth. I don’t particularly believe in God, but I believe in saying Kaddish. I believe in it because it’s what my great-great-grandparents said when someone died, and it’s what my parents said when my grandparents died, and one day when I die, it’s what will be said for me. Jewish is choosing our traditions and choosing what they mean. I fast on Yom Kippur not because I care what God thinks of me, but because I’ve been offered a vocabulary for introspection and repentance, and I choose to use it, in solidarity with all the others who have used or are using it. I don’t spend the day in synagogue; I spend it at my parents’ house, with my family, because that time is holier to me. My parents’ friends and their children come over to our house to break the fast, or we go over to one of their houses. The rabbi sometimes drops by. A nice guy, but when gay couples couldn’t get married at our temple, I went out of my way to avoid talking to him. For me, Jewish has always been about acceptance and social justice and saying we are all slaves until everyone is freed. So Jewish and gay have never been incompatible. But we’re liberal. Just after college I saw a documentary called Trembling Before G-d about gay Orthodox Jews and their struggle, and I realized My People can be as blind and intolerant as any other People. To me, Jewish is understanding this and fighting this. Jewish is tikkun olam, and knowing the world is broken, and wanting to fix it through love and kindness. My family taught me this. Jewish is when we gather together. It is hiding the afikomen where the youngest cousin can find it. It’s the joyful cacophony of a family that can’t sing well still singing the blessings. It’s latkes and maror and marshmallows melted on sweet potatoes and—okay, so maybe Jewish is matzoh ball soup to me. I’m vegetarian, so I can’t have it with chicken stock. My mom makes a separate vegetable stock for me and puts two matzoh balls in. That’s Jewish, too, to me.

  2.

  If you were young and gay and Jewish in the early 1980s, you edified your desire however you could. Even if it involved a book called Great Jews in Sports.

  I am sure there are kids who would have picked up Great Jews in Sports at the B’nai Bookmobile. But mostly it was a book given as a gift. It was a hagiography of Sandy-Koufax-Who-Wouldn’t-Play-On-High-Holy-Days and Hank Greenberg and others I can’t remember. And if you were young and gay and Jewish in the early 1980s, the centerfold of your attention was always Mark Spitz.

  Oh, Mark Spitz.

  Nine-time gold medalist at the Olympics. Perhaps the greatest Jewish sports hero of all Jewish sports heroes. Swam himself into the history books.

  The iconic shot (look it up) is him wearing a number of his gold medals.

  But if you’re young and gay and Jewish in the early 1980s, the gold medals are mere jewelry. Because what you see isn’t just a sports hero. No, what you see is a strong, sexy, confident Jewish man proudly parading in a very short, very tight swimsuit.

  This goes against all the iconography you’ve thus far been given about what it is to be a Jewish male. This isn’t Tevye. Or Billy Crystal. Or Sandy Koufax (bless him). The cultural models for your maleness: the rebbe, the comic, or the Noble Great. All worthy models. But none of them have anything to do with desire.

  Mark Spitz is hot.

  This is not a word you would use in six grade, or necessarily acknowledge. But you turn to this picture of him so many times the book starts to open on its own accord to his spread. The book is telling you something, and it has nothing to do with sports.

  3.

  When the most popular Jewish dating site decided to finally match same-sex couples, I gave it a try. This was many years ago now.

  One of my first dates was with a guy named Akiva.

  We were both in our twenties. Both from the New York area. Both Jewish. Both incredibly awkward on a first date.

  I asked him where he’d gone to school. He mentioned a yeshiva that sounded vaguely familiar. Which made sense, because they all sounded the same to me.

  He told me it had been a challenge.

  I said, “Wait—you’re Orthodox?”

  “Was,” he told me.

  “So you jumped off the God bandwagon?” I joked.

  And he looked at me seriously and said, “No. I just changed the road that the bandwagon was driving on.”

  It became one of those conversations where the other person shows you his scars, and you have to decide whether or not to tell him that, actually, they’re still bleeding. He was telling me about making his own life, about making his own relationship to God, but at the same time it was obvious (to me) that he was still defining himself entirely in opposition to where he was coming from.

  “It’s hard,” he said after he’d taken about ten minutes to tell me how okay he was. “When you’re raised one way and then try to raise yourself another way. You’re given this absolute and then, wham, it’s no longer an absolute. All along you thought God was closed to interpretation, and then you realize it’s all interpretation. It’s like being told there’s no physics or chemistry, or that the dictionary isn’t real.”

  I had a sense that I wasn’t the first person with whom he’d shared these analogies. But I nodded. I asked him what it was like growing up gay and Orthodox. This led, naturally, to us sharing our coming-out stories—in gay dating, this is what separates a frivolous first date from a substantial one, the willingness to take this particular story down from the shelf where it sits next to the moment you first knew, and your first kiss, and the first time you ha
d sex.

  So I told him, and he told me, and his story was more interesting than mine. But I might not have remembered it if, at the end, he hadn’t said, “There was this one boy at my school—he was a year older than me. One of those redheaded Jews. Copper, really. I had the biggest crush on him. Only, I wasn’t sure what his story was. Then—get this—one day he runs away to San Francisco! Like, completely out of the blue. Says, ‘Mom, Dad, I’m gay and you’re never going to accept that, so I have to get the hell out of here, goodbye.’ And then he calls a few of his friends and tells them why he’s leaving. Of course, the next day, it’s all anyone could talk about. The school doesn’t know whether to have an assembly or order vaccinations. And I have to tell you—it gave me hope. Even though I had to live through two years of hearing his name used synonymously with every gay slur you can imagine, Hebrew or English, I would daydream about him being out there in the world, and knew that while I didn’t have the guts to run away, I would get there eventually.”

  “Which you have,” I pointed out.

  This got the first smile of the date. “Which I have.”

  Aware of a tingle spreading from my heartbeat, I asked him, “What was that boy’s name?”

  “Moshe. Although I think he changed it when he left.”

  I asked Moshe’s last name. Akiva answered with a very common Jewish last name.

  I asked him what town in Long Island he was from. He named the town.

  It was all falling into place.

  “What happened to him?” I asked. “What happened to Moshe?”

  “He’s doing great. My mom sees his mom every now and then, and because my mom has so few gay sons to report back about, she always makes a point of telling me he’s doing great. Still in San Francisco. Going to grad school at Stanford for some science thing. I couldn’t tell you if he’s, like, partnered or anything—I think his mom only tells my mom about his academic achievements. Why do you ask? Did you know him?”

  “I’m not sure,” I lied.

  4.

  We met at my cousin’s Bat Mitzvah. Of course.

  (To be Jewish is to know the full meaning of that of course.)

  My cousins weren’t Orthodox, but most of my uncle’s business partners were. (I’d tell you his occupation, but it’s such a Jewish cliché that I’d rather not.) We were sixteen years old and we were still at the kids’ table. We weren’t sitting next to each other, but we were the only people at the table old enough to see over the centerpiece, so we made eye contact immediately. When I wasn’t trying to help one younger cousin find a Transformer under the table or another younger cousin get the exact same size slice of challah as her sister, I tried to make conversation. It was all pretty generic until we acknowledged the centerpiece itself—a blowup of the Playbill for The Phantom of the Opera. (Because my cousin’s Bat Mitzvah theme was Broadway. Of course.)

  Now I was intrigued. This copper-haired Orthodox boy knew his musicals. (While I avoid Jewish clichés, I clearly don’t mind sharing a gay one.) Only…he knew most of them through cast albums taken out from the library, while I had already seen plenty onstage. Most crucially, I had just seen Into the Woods for the first time—my grandparents, thinking fairy tales = safe fun for the grandchildren! had taken me and a couple of my cousins to see it; the rest of the children hadn’t listened, but I had. And now I was switching seats with my seven-year-old cousin so I could sit next to Moshe and recount it to him, scene by scene, as the salad plates were lifted from our table and the dancing began.

  I had kissed boys before. I had felt that extra electricity between me and another boy—at first not understanding what it was, then understanding exactly what it was. While I still hadn’t sewn the word gay into my identity, I was definitely keeping the space open for it. I was not innocent to what I was feeling as I was talking to him, as I was trying to explain what happened in the woods between the Baker’s Wife and the Prince. But I couldn’t tell if Moshe was having the same kind of conversation I was having.

  The band launched into the hora, and before I fully knew what I was doing, I was taking Moshe by the hand and pulling him to the dance floor. Even with my family and his family and everyone else around, we could hold hands this way. He smiled at me, and I read everything I wanted and needed into that smile. Once we started dancing, I wouldn’t let go. As we kicked and swirled, I wouldn’t let go. As my grandmother tried to cut in to dance next to me, I wouldn’t let go. As my uncle tried to pull me to the center to help lift my newly adult cousin on a flimsy folding chair, I wouldn’t let go. And neither would Moshe. By the end of the dance, we both knew something had happened, and neither of us said a thing about it.

  The younger cousins at our table sometimes demanded my attention, but the rest of the afternoon I devoted to talking to Moshe, and he devoted it to talking to me, right until his father showed up behind his chair and told him it was time to make the drive home. Once his dad was gone, Moshe wrote his phone number on his place card and gave it to me. Then I did the same for him.

  This was before cell phones. Before the Internet. This was a time when if you had a phone number, it was your family’s phone number. What you said might be private, but the fact that you were talking to a boy on the phone was not.

  I hatched a plan. Michael Feinstein, a singer I admired for reasons I didn’t fully fathom, was about to do a limited run on Broadway. The next time I was in Manhattan, I went to the box office and purchased two tickets for the following Sunday, using the money I’d earned from working at my high school library. Then I found a pay phone and called Moshe to ask him to join me. He asked his parents if he could. They said yes. (No doubt all they had to hear was Feinstein to know he’d be in good hands.)

  He took the train in from Long Island. I took the train in from New Jersey. We met at a kosher pizza place for lunch beforehand. I had never had kosher pizza before, and while I’m sure culinary science has improved kosher pizza significantly in the intervening years, the pizza that day tasted like someone had taken a frozen pizza out of its box and then served us the box. Worse, because we were surrounded by so many other Obvious Jews, our conversation was guarded, afraid of the very Jewish geography that had brought us together.

  It was only when we got to the theater that we relaxed into being ourselves. It was a concert of jazz standards, and we were the youngest people there by a good two decades. In walking from the kosher pizza place to the Broadway theater, we had stepped from Moshe’s world into my world, and my world was far more welcoming. Even if we were the only teenagers there, we were far from the only gay couple. We noticed them. We took their existence as permission to exist in the way we wanted to exist.

  Where do you start? Michael Feinstein sang.

  I took Moshe’s hand in mine.

  Isn’t it romantic?

  He leaned into me. We watched other men lean into one another.

  How about you?

  Some of the songs were new to us. But you don’t have to know a song to feel it run through your nervous system. You don’t have to have the words on your lips to understand their meaning.

  They can’t take that away from me….

  It was still daylight when we left the theater. We each knew the trains we were supposed to catch. As we walked to Penn Station, we talked about the show, mostly because it was too scary to talk about anything else. The distance from the Lyceum Theatre to Penn Station was not a long one. When we got to the escalator leading down to the tracks, I started to formulate a goodbye—but all that came out was how much I was enjoying myself, enjoying his company, enjoying us.

  Then he surprised me. More than any boy had surprised me up to that point, and more, I would guess, than any man has surprised me since.

  “Let’s go,” he said. And I genuinely didn’t know what he meant. But then he was grabbing my hand just like I had grabbed h
is for the hora, and he was pulling me across the street to the Hotel Pennsylvania.

  * * *

  —

  I might not have understood what was going on, but the guy behind the front desk did, and he loved it. Absolutely loved it. One of our kind, I realize now. He made sure to ask us if we were getting the room while our parents “parked the car.” He didn’t look at all surprised when Moshe paid in cash.

  “I was planning to pay you back for my ticket,” Moshe said, “and I wasn’t sure how much it cost. But this is better, right?”

  I nodded. This was better.

  The Hotel Pennsylvania was about half a century past its prime, but we didn’t care. That ramshackle room was the most magical place either of us had ever been. The minute we got inside, Moshe kissed me like a soldier who’d just come home from the war. He gave me everything in that kiss, and I tried to give him everything in return. Somewhere in the back of our minds, we knew our parents would be waiting for us at two different train stations, but that part of our minds no longer mattered to us. What mattered was the inextricable velocity drawing us toward each other. What mattered was that we were free to touch each other the way we wanted to touch, free to be touched the way we wanted to be touched. I took his sweater off, took his pants off, and only hesitated at the tallis that had been under his sweater the whole time; he folded it neatly and put it on a chair. We were the wise sons, the wicked sons, the simple sons, the sons who didn’t have the words for what we were doing, but knew nonetheless that what we were doing was larger than our lives. This, to us, was sacred. We learned: For some things, enlightenment does not come from above or even from within. It comes from beside. From being beside.