Sweet Like Sugar (4 page)

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Authors: Wayne Hoffman

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #General, #Jewish Men, #Male Friendship, #Rabbis, #Jewish, #Religion, #Jewish Gay Men, #Judaism

BOOK: Sweet Like Sugar
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I put the mock-ups and a cover letter in a manila envelope and brought them to the bar Friday evening. The bartender told me to slip them under the door of the office in the back.
Phil was sitting at the bar, fingers wrapped around a gin and tonic; I'd phoned him barely an hour earlier and he said he'd meet me at Paradise “for a quickie.”
“Can't stay long,” he said as I pulled up a stool. “Dinner plans.”
“Wow, that's more than a whole week with the same guy,” I said.
“No, this is someone new,” he said, chuckling at himself. “I know.
Quelle surprise
.”
“I just don't know how you keep their names straight.”
“If I forget, I just call them ‘baby,' ” he said.
“Seriously?”
“Geez, Benji, what kind of guy do you think I am?” he teased. “I write their names on the palm of my hand.”
I took Phil's hand and checked his palm. Clean.
“And how about you?” he asked. “Meeting the guy from Monday night? Benji's latest blond?”
“His name is Pete,” I said.
“And this time you don't have to work tomorrow. Maybe little Benji is gonna get lucky?”
“Luck,” I deadpanned, “has nothing to do with it.”
I told him about the ad campaign I'd proposed for Paradise.
“You went biblical?” he asked. “Seems like a strange way to sell a gay bar.”
“I don't know,” I said. “Guys wearing fig leaves seemed like a pretty good place to start.”
“Just quit before you get to crucifixion. Too kinky.”
“That's your Bible,” I said. “Not mine.”
“Right, like you have a Bible.”
“Just because I don't believe it, that doesn't mean it's not mine.”
“I suppose,” he said.
Phil left after he finished his drink and Pete arrived a few minutes later, wearing—thank goodness—a shirt without an alligator. I didn't want to stick around long, because at that point Paradise reminded me of work. So after one quick cocktail, we ducked out and walked over to Seventeenth Street, to a coffeehouse.
I asked him about his week and he recounted a couple of funny stories about one of the attorneys in his office, a closet case with bad breath. Then Pete, true to his word, started asking me about myself.
I told him about growing up in the suburbs of D.C. and how I had decided to stay in the area while my sister had chosen to move all the way across the country, to Seattle. I told him about how I double-majored in English and art at the University of Maryland, despite my parents' insistence that neither of these majors would ever earn me a dime. I told him about the string of jobs I'd endured after college—designing advertisements for a local magazine, crafting pamphlets for a nonprofit AIDS service organization, teaching arts and crafts at the YMCA, working in a printing shop in a mall—and how I'd taken a gamble and opened my own office the previous winter with just two steady clients: a suburban gardening club that needed someone to lay out its monthly newsletter and a downtown rock venue that hired me to design posters and newspaper ads, barely enough to pay rent on my office.
And I told him about the rabbi.
“Freaky,” was his first reaction.
“Which part?”
“The whole thing,” he said. “Is he one of those whatever-they're-calleds, with the black hats and the curls?”
“Hasidim? No. He's just a rabbi.”
“Still.”
“I know, it's pretty weird. But I don't really mind it, to be honest.”
“You're Jewish, right? Steiner?”
“Yeah.”
“We didn't have many Jews in Greensboro,” he said. “You're the first Jewish guy I've ever gone out with.”
“Want to know something? I've never dated a Jewish guy.”
“You're kidding me,” he said. “Why not?”
“Never really thought about it,” I said. “I guess I've always had a thing for blonds.”
“Lucky for me,” said Pete, with a smirk.
We sat for a while longer while he asked me about the other blond guys I'd dated. He was a good listener.
We left the coffeehouse and headed to a little disco on P Street. He was a good dancer.
We took a break from dancing and kissed next to the coat check. He was a good kisser.
So far, I thought, so good.
 
Saturday, I went to visit my parents, who lived about twenty minutes from me, in Rockville. I typically saw them maybe once every other week. I'd go over for dinner, or they'd take Michelle and me to a show downtown, or some family friend would have some kind of affair—bris, bar mitzvah, wedding, funeral—that we'd go to together. We all got along, particularly when our time together was limited to a couple of hours.
This time, though, I wasn't looking forward to the visit. My folks were having their old friends the Mehlmans over for brunch, including the Mehlmans' son Andy, visiting from San Diego. Andy and I never had much in common; he was a year older, something of a jock in high school, smart but too cool to get good grades, the kind of guy who used to tease guys like me. But we had known each other through our parents since we were toddlers, and they all still assumed we'd prefer having each other's company to having nobody our own age at the table. That assumption wasn't true for me, and I suspected it wasn't for Andy, but nevertheless. Honor thy parents. I had to go.
My mother asked me to pick up a gallon of orange juice on my way over, so I stopped by the supermarket next to my office. As I was putting the juice in my car, Saturday morning services were letting out at B'nai Tikvah, the little Orthodox synagogue just across the main parking lot. The women came out first, maybe forty of them in long skirts and long-sleeved blouses, with small children trailing behind. The men followed, a larger group in dark suits and white shirts, old men and teenage boys together; black yarmulkes topped almost every head, glasses graced almost every face. Rabbi Zuckerman was among them, one of the older men who favored hats, but he lagged behind the rest. And while the other men made conversation punctuated with nods and gesticulations, the rabbi seemed to focus all his energy on the simple act of walking in the midday heat.
I stood next to my car, unseen, and watched him. With great effort, he made it to the corner crosswalk. Already, though, he was left alone; the others had made it across and were heading down the opposite sidewalks in every direction. He wiped his brow as he waited for the light to change, then slowly crossed the street with the walk signal. He continued straight ahead, up the hill into a residential development, struggling with the side street's gentle rise as if he were climbing a mountain.
After he vanished from view, I got into my car and drove to Rockville, turning up the stereo so I could hear Coldplay over the blast of the air conditioner.
Andy was the center of attention at brunch, since he had come the farthest, so he got to talk about his job and his house and his Hawaiian vacation and his sports car. The dads asked him some questions about the Padres and the Chargers. I didn't have any questions. I was more interested in the bagels and lox.
But when Mrs. Mehlman finally interrupted and asked what I'd been doing lately, I told everyone about Rabbi Zuckerman sleeping on my couch all week, and it seemed to entertain them more than anything Andy had to talk about. I played it up to keep the conversation from shifting back to professional sports or something equally mundane. And the questions kept coming.
“On your
couch?
”
“Was he
asleep?
”
“He came
back?
”
“Didn't anyone call a
doctor?
”
And then my mother's question: “What kind of a rabbi is he?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Does he have a congregation?” she asked.
“No, he owns the Jewish bookstore.”
“I thought you had to have a congregation to be a rabbi.” That was Andy's contribution.
“Apparently not,” I said.
“Well, is he Conservative? Reform?”
“I think he's Orthodox. He wears a yarmulke all the time. And he goes to B'nai Tikvah. That's Orthodox, right?”
“Yes, it is,” my father said.
“He's not trying to convert you, is he?” my mother asked.
“Convert me to what?” I asked. “I'm already Jewish.”
“Not to him, you're not,” she said. “As far as the Orthodox are concerned, we might as well be Baptists. Or devil worshippers.”
“Judy, don't be ridiculous,” my father added gently.
“Mom, we've never even spoken.”
“Good, just keep it that way,” my mother said. “Those Orthodox are just like a cult. You know that Edie Hirsch's son Adam became Orthodox and now he won't even eat in his parents' house and he won't even let them babysit for their own grandchildren overnight because he's afraid they'll fill the kids' heads with other ideas—ideas that he grew up with himself before he got brainwashed! They're crazy, I'm telling you. Just stay away from them.”
“He's not going to brainwash me,” I said. “He can barely stand up.”
“Well, just keep an eye on him. I don't want you coming home with
payes
and those tzitzis hanging out. I knew it was a bad idea to open your office in Glenbrook. Too many black hats.”
I didn't respond.
My father, never a fan of drama, tried to ratchet things down: “Judy, B'nai Tikvah isn't for black hats. It's Modern Orthodox.”
“What's that mean?” asked Andy.
“It means they observe all the laws of Judaism, and men and women sit separately in synagogue, but they live in the modern world,” my father explained. “They work in all kinds of jobs—lawyers, teachers, businessmen—and they go to Redskins games and movies, and they wear normal clothes and they even shave. They're just observant, that's all. They're not like Hasidim, with furry hats and black coats and long beards.”
“So they don't wear funny hats, big deal,” my mother said. “They're still religious nuts.”
My father replied: “First you're upset that he doesn't go to synagogue anymore and he isn't observant enough. And now you're worried that he'll become too observant?”
Yes, if there was anything worse than her children neglecting the traditions she held dear, it was the notion that her children might berate her for her own random assortment of religious observances and nonobservances: keeping kosher at home but eating
treyf
outside the house; going to synagogue on Saturday mornings but shopping at the mall on Saturday afternoons; having a seder every year but ignoring Passover for the other seven days.
“Nothing's changed, Mom,” I said. “I'm not becoming Orthodox, or Conservative, or Reform. Or Satanist. So don't worry about it.”
By this point, I'd have been thrilled to have the conversation shift to baseball or football or anything else. And sure enough, Andy came through with a brilliant California-themed segue—“I heard a joke the other day: A rabbi and a priest and a Buddhist monk are in a rowboat with Arnold Schwarzenegger . . .”—and my mother's tirade was over, for the time being.
After we were done eating, the Mehlmans said their good-byes. And then, as I helped my mother clear the table, she started in again.
“I just don't understand it. You never want to come to synagogue with us, your own parents. You tell us it's just not for you. Fine. I don't like it, but fine. But now you're hanging out with some Orthodox rabbi from Glenbrook?”
“We're not ‘hanging out.' ”
“Well, whatever you want to call it.”
“He needed a place to lie down. That's all.”
She gave me one of her looks that said, “I know better, believe me.” There was no comeback for a look like that.
I went upstairs to my old bedroom, which had recently become my mother's “office,” meaning she kept a computer on my desk and a fax machine on my dresser, which she used for “making arrangements” like buying airplane tickets and reserving hotels. The things I used to keep on my desk were now stuffed inside. I opened the bottom drawer and found some old CDs from high school: Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, Portishead. Depressing music for angst-ridden nineties teens. I grabbed a few for nostalgia's sake.
My father walked in behind me. “Don't take your mother too seriously,” he said, his way of taking my side privately without criticizing her publicly—his usual course of action.

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