Sweet Like Sugar (5 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 don't,” I said.
He took out his wallet. “Do you need some money?”
I did. Business was a bit slow. But I didn't want to take it.
“I'm fine, Dad.”
He fished out a twenty.
“Here, take it,” he said, holding out the bill. “For gas. We're always making you drive out here.”
The drive to my parents' house required about a buck's worth of gas. But I took the money.
“Thanks,” I said, stuffing it in my front pocket.
“Listen,” he said, changing the subject, “what are you doing for the Fourth of July? We were thinking of going somewhere for the day. Annapolis, or Baltimore. If you and Michelle aren't doing anything . . .”
“Thanks, but we both have plans.”
“Oh,” he said. “That's nice. She still seeing Dan?”
“Yeah.”
“And who's your date?” he asked tentatively. I'd been out to them since my sophomore year of college, and they'd met a handful of guys I'd gone out with and heard about several more, particularly after things had gone sour. But even after all these years, despite being relatively comfortable having a gay son, my folks were still reluctant to ask me directly about who I might be dating—although at least my father took the bait sometimes if I brought it up first. I think he was primarily worried about prying into my private life, something Rachel had often berated him about when she was dating, rather than uncomfortable hearing me talk about other men. Not that I'd ever asked.
“His name's Pete,” I said.
“Is it serious?” he asked.
“I'll let you know.”
The manager of Paradise called Monday morning with good news: I got the job. They signed me up for a yearlong deal, creating one new ad for each month. They would run in local gay papers and alternative weeklies and would be slightly modified as posters to be hung around Dupont Circle in windows, on bulletin boards, and on lightposts. He wanted to kick off the campaign with the devil poster and move on from there; we'd meet occasionally to go over new ideas. The manager already had a photographer lined up. All we needed to do now was land the right models.
“This is the fun part,” I said. “Finding guys who look good with their clothes off.”
“Hardly sounds like work,” said the manager.
I was playing it cool, but the job was important to me. I needed the money. Next time, I thought to myself, I won't need to take “gas money” from my dad.
 
Monday afternoon, the rabbi came at the usual time, without a word. But once he got settled, I left my office and walked around to the front of the shopping center to the Jewish bookstore.
“Hello, Benjamin,” Mrs. Goldfarb called from behind the counter. “I know why you're here. But this is the last time. Look, they're working on the air conditioner right now.”
She pointed to a man on a ladder in the back of the store.
“We should be just fine by tomorrow,” she said. “The store will be cooler, and Rabbi Zuckerman won't need to lie down, and everything will be back to normal. You can have your couch back.”
Strangely enough, I was disappointed.
“Actually, that's not why I'm here,” I said. “The rabbi isn't even bugging me.”
“Well, that makes one of us!” she blurted before catching herself. “Oh, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that.”
“What's the problem?”
“He's just a difficult man to work with sometimes,” she said diplomatically. “But it's perfectly understandable. If I were in his position . . .” She drifted off without finishing the sentence, assuming I'd know what she meant. I didn't. But I didn't ask.
I told Mrs. Goldfarb that I'd seen the rabbi walking uphill on Saturday afternoon, in the heat. I asked if she knew where he lived.
“Just a few blocks from here,” she said, “right in the development across the street.”
“He walks to work every day?” I asked.
“He sure does,” she replied. “Every day. Back and forth.”
“It's straight up the hill. Why doesn't he drive?”
“They took away his license after he crashed into a telephone pole last winter,” she said. “We should all be thankful—that little old man in that huge old Pontiac, he was a menace on the road. Scraped my car once, in the parking lot. In broad daylight!”
“Couldn't someone give him a ride home?”
At this point she snorted out loud. “Someone, maybe. But not me. I've offered, believe me, I've offered many times. But I tell you, the man is stubborn. Once I was pulling out of the parking lot when I saw him standing at the entrance to the shopping center, leaning against the Don't Walk sign, trying to catch his breath. ‘Rabbi, please just get in,' I said to him. He leaned over and looked in my car—which is very neat, by the way, no clutter or cat hair or anything—and said no.”
“Why would he say no?”
“He's an old-fashioned man,” she said.
Mrs. Goldfarb presented her supporting evidence: The rabbi grumbled whenever she wore pants to work. He had complained when she suggested selling a line of yarmulkes and prayer shawls specially designed for women. (“I finally won that argument,” she said with pride, “and these are very big sellers for us, thank you very much.”) He had balked at her idea of creating a humor section for the books, claiming—so Mrs. Goldfarb recounted—that “there's nothing funny about being Jewish.”
“So why is it so hard for you to believe,” she said, “that maybe he doesn't like women drivers?”
“Come on,” I said.
“Rabbi Zuckerman has some very strange ideas stuck in his head,” she said. “This one is no stranger than the rest.”
“Do you think he'd let me drive him home?” I asked.
“Well, you're not a woman. . . .”
“Is that a yes?”
“I have no idea, Benjamin, but if you really want to, you can ask him yourself,” said Mrs. Goldfarb. “You know where to find him.”
The rabbi and I hadn't exchanged a single word that week—or ever—but I broke the silence in my office that afternoon. When he sat up after his spell on the couch and put his shoes back on, I asked him: “Rabbi Zuckerman, it's still very hot when it's time for you to go home. Would you like me to give you a ride?”
He looked up at me, and stood up, surprised, head cocked.
“Yes, Mr. Steiner, I would,” he said in a gravelly voice, bowing slightly toward me.
So he does speak English, I thought. Not even an accent.
“My car is right outside, the blue Corolla. Just come knock when you're ready to go.”
He nodded and opened my office door. Back to the silent routine.
“Rabbi?” I asked him. “How did you know my name?” Mrs. Goldfarb had never used it and we had never been introduced.
He pointed at the nameplate on my door. Then he walked out.
His knock came around six o'clock. I grabbed my backpack, shut down my computer, and got up to leave.
“I'm parked over here,” I said on the sidewalk, pointing to my little sedan. The rabbi walked slowly, a few steps behind me. If he noticed my anti-Bush bumper sticker—a simple black “W” with a red circle and a slash over it—I couldn't see his reaction.
I opened the passenger door and waited to see if he needed my help getting in; he didn't. Then I got in the driver's side, tossed my bag in the back, and started the car.
The stereo was blaring, the same Nine Inch Nails album I'd been listening to that morning, at a volume my parents would call “ear-splitting”:
My whole existence is flawed. You get me closer to God
.
Rabbi Zuckerman sat up straight—from the sheer loudness of the unexpected assault, not, I assumed, from the mention of God. I punched the off button. I couldn't imagine what the rabbi would do if we got to the part where Trent Reznor sings,
“I want to fuck you like an animal
.
”
He'd probably jump out of the car, then and there.
I chuckled sheepishly and apologized. He didn't say anything, just adjusted the air conditioner vent and looked straight ahead. I backed out of my parking space and headed for the exit.
“How far up the hill are you?” I asked.
“Four blocks, on the right,” he said. “I'll show you.”
The drive was quick and quiet. His house was a small brick cottage with three concrete steps to the front door. A maple tree took up most of his modest front yard. No flowers, just grass and a couple of small bushes on either side of the doorway. I pulled into his short, empty driveway.
He unbuckled his seat belt.
“Thank you, Mr. Steiner,” he said.
“No problem, Rabbi Zuckerman, but please call me Benji.”
“Fine. Thank you, Benji, for the ride.”
It was the longest sentence he'd uttered to me. I decided to push further.
“You know, Mrs. Goldfarb told me that she offered you a ride, but you turned her down because you don't trust women drivers.”
“Linda Goldfarb knows far less than she thinks she does,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I don't care about women drivers,” he said. “I won't ride in her car because it stinks of perfume and cigarettes. It's hard enough to work in the same store with her sometimes.”
I looked at him and he cracked a smile. The first time I'd ever seen that.
“But let her think what she wants,” he said.
I laughed, and he laughed, too.
He opened the door to get out, assuring me again (by waving me off before I could even ask) that he didn't need any help.
“Next time, Benji,” he said before he closed the door and headed up his walkway, “not such loud music, okay?”
CHAPTER 3
W
ith the bookstore's air conditioner fixed, the rabbi's daily breaks in my office ended.
No matter. We had developed a new routine. He didn't stop by during the afternoon anymore, but I continued driving him home at the end of the day, a few blocks up the hill. Most often, we didn't exchange more than simple pleasantries: “How was your day?” “Did you have a nice weekend?” “How are you feeling?” Nonetheless, it wasn't a major imposition for me and he seemed grateful for the gesture.
I ran into Mrs. Goldfarb one day at lunchtime in the shopping center's sandwich shop.
“I hear you're Rabbi Zuckerman's chauffeur now,” she said. I couldn't tell if she was being sarcastic or just teasing me.
“I drive him home,” I said. “That's all.”
“So I guess he just doesn't like
me,
” she said.
“No,” I said, “you were right about him. He doesn't trust women drivers.”
“I
knew
it,” said Mrs. Goldfarb, with a satisfied expression.
Let her think what she wants.
 
Pete, I realized on the Fourth of July, was not the guy for me.
There were little things that tipped me off: He was half an hour late meeting me at the Dupont Circle Metro station, and didn't think to call my cell, or to apologize when he finally arrived. He was wearing a Clay Aiken concert T-shirt—without apparent irony. He had already eaten, even though we were supposed to have lunch together; I was stuck scarfing down a Subway sub on a park bench.
Nonetheless, all of that could have been forgiven. Even Clay Aiken.
The real problem started when we went downtown, walking along the Mall. The main lawn around the monuments was thick with families on picnic blankets and teenagers throwing Frisbees. Lafayette Square, across from the White House, was crowded, too—with protesters. A demonstration against the Iraq War was going strong. People with megaphones led chants like “Two-four-six-eight, end the war, it's not too late” and “Hey-hey-ho-ho, Bush and Cheney have got to go!” Many people waved small American flags, while others held signs saying “No Penalty For Early Withdrawal” and “Bush's Mission Accomplished: 3,000 Troops Dead.”
“Want to stick around?” Pete asked. I did, assuming that we were on the same page politically, beyond both hating Bush. But while we were both against the war, I soon found out that we were coming from different perspectives.
“End the Zionist Occupations: U.S. Out of Iraq, Israel Out of Palestine” read a sign in the middle of the park. The “o” in Zionist had a small red swastika inside.
I pointed and said, almost involuntarily, in an exasperated voice, “Can't we have one antiwar protest without the crazies ruining it?”
“What's so crazy about that?” Pete asked.
That's where it started. I was no hardliner—I supported Palestinian statehood and opposed the settlements in the West Bank, both stances that made my parents uneasy—but when I saw people making bogus connections like the one on that sign, I smelled something rotten.
“How exactly is our occupation of Iraq ‘Zionist'?” I asked.
“Well, look who started the war.”
I started the list, counting off names on my fingers: “Bush. Cheney. Colin Powell. Donald Rumsfeld. Condoleezza Rice.”
“Oh, come on,” Pete countered. “Jewish neocons were pushing for this war from the beginning, and they pulled all the strings to get what they wanted, like they always do. Seems pretty obvious that we're only there to protect Israel.”
“You have an interesting idea about how much power Jews have in this country, especially considering how few there are in this administration,” I said. “Do you realize that there's no group in America that's more consistently
opposed
to this war than the Jews?”
It devolved from there. He repeated some conspiracy-theory baloney about Jews being warned to stay out of the Twin Towers on September 11. (“I'm not saying I believe it, necessarily,” he said. “I'm just saying it's something to think about.”) He segued into an explanation about how suicide bombers blowing up kids in a Jerusalem pizza parlor could be justified. (“You know, out of sheer desperation.”) It only took about five more minutes before he got around to comparing Israel to the Third Reich: “What they're doing to the Palestinians really isn't so different . . .”
I was done.
“I'm taking the Metro home,” I told him.
“Geez, Benji, don't be so oversensitive,” he said. “Can't we even have a simple political disagreement? Isn't this why people move to D.C.?”
“I don't know,” I said. “I've always lived here.”
And I walked away. The trains heading out of the city were empty; most people were headed into town for the festivities. I made it home in time to microwave a frozen pizza and watch the fireworks on television.
Dan dropped off Michelle before midnight. She could see that I was brooding.
“All right, what's wrong with this one?” she asked.
“How do you know something's wrong?”
“Well, he ain't here, is he?”
“True.”
“So what is it
this
time?” she asked. “Last time the guy had a dog you didn't like. Before that was the one who played video games too much. Then there was that guy who did drag on the weekends—what was his name? Simon? I liked him. But I guess you were freaked out by all the makeup.”
“And the chest stubble.”
“Major ick,” said Michelle, wincing.
“Exactly.”
“And what is Pete's problem?”
Politics were never a big deal to Michelle, but she understood; she was Jewish, too. She also remembered the campus debates about Zionism when we were undergraduates. When the second Intifada broke out in 2000, pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian student groups organized competing teachins, as well as angry protests and counterprotests on campus. Any time I dared to defend the middle ground—territorial compromise and peace based on a two-state solution—I found myself attacked from both sides. The progressive folks I'd befriended in the campus gay group said I was a “Zionist racist” for believing in a Jewish state at all; it was one subject that made me feel alienated from that otherwise welcoming crowd. Not that I felt any sympathy coming from the Jewish groups on campus, either. The outspoken activists who staffed the Stand With Israel table in the student center labeled me a “Nazi collaborator” for suggesting that the Palestinians deserved a state of their own.
Michelle, who wasn't as personally invested in the subject, knew how difficult that had been for me. So when I told her about Pete, just as she'd done several years earlier at Maryland, she suggested I simply stay out of this kind of conflict.
“You should have avoided talking about politics,” she said, “until you knew him better.”
“Yeah, right. He would have noticed that I kept ducking out of dates to attend meetings of worldwide Jewry where we make our plans to rule the world. I mean, those meetings take
hours.
”
She sucked her teeth and gave me a look that said, “Oh, you're
so
droll.”
“I don't see your boyfriend here, either,” I said. “What gives?”
“Well, your little plan worked beautifully,” she started. “We spent the afternoon with two of his friends. We went paddle-boating by the Jefferson Memorial, we played Frisbee, we walked by the sculpture garden. And then his friends left, and Dan and I had a picnic on the Mall and watched the fireworks, and it was great.”
“Uh-huh. So I don't see the problem.”
“There was no problem until we were driving home. I was telling him what a great day it had been. You know, trying some positive reinforcement. That's important when you're training a new male.”
I pursed my lips and gave her a look that said, “Don't start on this again.”
“And then he's like, ‘See, you were all upset over nothing. ' And I'm like, ‘Excuse me?' And he's all, ‘You said you didn't want to spend time with my friends, but now you see they're cool. So you were all worked up over nothing.' And I lost my shit. I told him that he'd missed the whole point, that I never said I didn't want to spend time with his friends, that all I said was that I wanted some time alone with the guy who is
supposed
to be my boyfriend. And that if he didn't understand that spending time with his
girlfriend
wasn't
nothing,
then maybe he wasn't ready for a girlfriend.”
Michelle was my best friend and I backed her up, even as I felt sorry for Dan, who had unknowingly stepped into a minefield—stupidly but without malice.
“Did you guys break up?”
She looked confused.
“No, Benji, it's not that big a deal. We're getting together this weekend.”
“I don't get it.”
“I cried, I made him feel like shit, and he's got one day to come up with some really great apology. Maybe flowers. Or tickets to something. But he'll come through. He's not an asshole. He just needs to learn.”
“Learn what?”
“That he ain't gonna be getting any from
this
girlfriend until I forgive him.”
She pursed her lips and punctuated her remark with a diva snap. We both cracked up.
Then we both went to our rooms. Alone.
 
Before I went to bed, I logged on and checked out ManMate, a website for gay personal ads. I wasn't a member, so I couldn't send or receive messages, but I could read people's profiles and look at their pictures. To see who was out there.
This kind of thing always struck me as a place for people too afraid to show their faces (or use their real speaking voices) in public. That's why I'd never signed up. Plus, the design was ridiculous: each photo in a star-shaped frame, set against a tacky rainbow-striped background.
It was a meeting place of last resort. But sometimes a last resort is better than nothing. This was one of those nights.
I could cross almost everyone off my list right away: too old, unattractive, smokes cigarettes. Or else I could cross myself off their lists, if they were looking specifically for something I wasn't: Asian, into leather, “discreet” (read: closeted). Guys from Virginia were excluded—it was hard enough to get someone from the District to consider coming to Maryland. A couple of guys looked familiar, people I'd seen at the bars; if they weren't interested in person, I thought, they won't be interested online.
The top of the page flashed: “Over three hundred men in your area—online now!” But within minutes, I'd narrowed my list of possibilities to a handful.
If I find someone promising,
I told myself,
I'll pay the damn fee right now and send him a note while he's still online.
I didn't want the Fourth of July to be a total loss.
The first guy was handsome. Square jawline. Crew cut. His profile said he was a “military type.” I didn't know if that meant he wore a uniform for work or merely for pleasure, but either way, we weren't a match. I didn't need someone barking orders at me. I had my mother for that.
The next one was younger, still in college, with shaggy blond hair. Cute. But his main interests were “Frisbee, beer, and BBQ!” I had nothing against any of those things, but would never have described them as “interests.” Much less my “main” interests.
Before I could even open the next profile—from a guy with a parted-hair, button-collar sort of preppy look—a box popped up on my screen. “You have used up your daily minutes as a trial member. But all you have to do to keep looking for Mister Right is click here, and join ManMate!”
I thought about it for just a few seconds before closing the browser and turning off my computer. It wasn't going to happen. I wasn't desperate enough. The Fourth of July was a dud. No fireworks at all.
 
A thunderstorm erupted unexpectedly late the next afternoon, the kind of summer storm that flares up with sudden ferocity but then moves on with determined speed. In most cities, these storms are welcome because they leave cooler, drier air in their wake. Not Washington: The heat that oppressed everyone before the storm returns immediately after the last drops fall; the humidity gets even worse.
When Rabbi Zuckerman knocked on my door, he was already wet after the short walk from his store, holding a newspaper over his head. “I didn't bring my umbrella today,” he said.
I grabbed mine and escorted him to the car. The rain was coming in sheets, and my windshield wipers couldn't keep up. It was hard to see. Fortunately, we didn't have far to go.

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