Watch Your Mouth (2 page)

Incessant.
All year long. We’d miss classes. The dining hall would ring its last-chance bell while we probed each other across campus. We’d forget about people who were stopping by to return books until they knocked and we’d greet them, rum- pled and impatient for them to leave. We got clumsy, bumping into end tables until the vase tipped and dumped the wilting flowers I’d bought at the Campus Center onto my bare back, the grimy greenish water onto her wriggling chest. We broke two lamps. We were falling in love like falling down drunk, like falling down stairs.

By midterms we didn’t need to talk much, we understood each other so well. One afternoon while driving somewhere, I

broke a long silence by admitting I’d never had sex in the back of an automobile; she pulled over and we went at it as the sweaty ghosts of her high-school lovers watched over us. Before she’d met me she’d barely ever had sex
not
in the back of an auto- mobile, and it was the same automobile. She’d driven it to Lo- cust, Pennsylvania, with duffels of clothes and graduation presents (unabridged dictionary, popcorn popper, coffee maker, unabridged dictionary) stacked in the backseat where she’d made them all come: the soccer-playing redhead, the pimply actor who got her in trouble with Dr. and Mrs. Glass for leaving cigarettes in her car and the tall one who played drums in a band and coaxed panting polyrhythms out of Cyn with stick- calluoused hands. It was like the car was some mad scientist invention that ran on bodily fluids instead of petroleum. She kept in touch with the actor, talking to him on the phone while I reached under the old shirt of mine she slept in. He was of- fering her a summer job at Camp Shalom. She accepted as she squirmed on the bed, covering the phone receiver to moan at me, and when he said he needed one more staff member she didn’t have to look further than her own tongue and that’s how Cyn and I ended up living in her parents’ house in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during the summer before my senior year at Mather College. The curtain rises.

Our story begins with a lost box. Each year, more than eighty trillion pieces of mail go through the United States Postal Ser- vice and more than fourteen percent of them are lost. Actually, I made up those statistics, but the person on the twenty-four- hour help line probably made up his, too. I could hear his

pimples on the phone, pulsing like bubbles in lava as he told me all about my lost box in the tone of voice you use when some guy calls you about his lost package and you’re getting off work in a half hour to go home and watch some rented porn.

I had an incomplete in a class it now seems too ridiculous to even mention. As the
Mather College Undergraduate Student Handbook
reads, “A grade of ‘incomplete’ can be designated for any credit class for a number of reasons. A major paper or exam hinging upon research that cannot be completed during the tra- ditional boundaries of the semester would be suitable grounds, as would a true personal or medical emergency. Requesting an incomplete because of an overextravagance of sexual activity, Joseph, is really pushing it. Unless the completion of the course requires research to be done elsewhere, it is expected that a student will remain in the Locust area.”

Well,
that
wasn’t going to happen. In the summertime, any questions on the origin of Locust, Pennsylvania’s name are re- solved in a cloud of gnats. Plus, I had been offered a job in Pittsburgh. Cyn, who licked my stamps, kept in touch with an ex-boyfriend of hers, an actor. I had seen pictures; he was a pimply little thing who’d gotten Cyn in trouble for leaving his cigarettes in the family car after she’d get extravagant on him. Even after all those hand jobs, he was still looking for a stiff member. “Shut
up,
Joseph. I said a
staff
member.” Two, in fact: Cyn and me. She was going to teach singing and I was going to run the Arts & Crafts Shack, spreading thick white glue out for children to play with. I couldn’t possibly stay in Locust.

All this was fine with my laid-back professor, Ted Steel, a large, oversensitive man the likes of which make political con- servatives rant and rave about the leftist dogma passing for ac-

ademia nowadays. Although Mather was named for a Puritan, nobody read him there, and the permissive climate had torn the pedagogy apart like a hymen. Did you catch that odd phrase in the
Handbook,
the one that didn’t belong? “The traditional bounds of the semester”? That’s how Professor Steel talked. I let him think I was sleeping with my first man and he agreed to mark me “incomplete.”

Cyn and I were taking her family car to Pittsburgh for the summer, but we couldn’t fit everything in the trunk and we wanted to leave the backseat free because it was a six-hour drive with plenty of deserted side roads. Steel had signed off on spe- cial library privileges so I could write my final paper while ex- ploring my gay identity in Pittsburgh. I wasn’t sure what I was going to write my paper on, so I withdrew the maximum amount of books and shoved them into a big box at Mathermail, where every September wide-eyed freshmen retrieved heavy trunks filled with clothes and graduation presents (unabridged dictionary, popcorn popper, coffee maker, unabridged dictionary). Some sullen high-school part-timer, probably sav- ing up for a car so
she
could tug orgasms out of pimply actors in relative privacy, took my money and said the box would arrive in Pittsburgh. It never did. Every so often I still get letters from Mather’s Library informing me of approximately three hundred thousand dollars in overdue fines.

I called and called. I called everybody even remotely con- nected with the postal service. They all had pimples, lied about statistics, and couldn’t locate my box, and that’s how Cyn and I ended up living in her parents’ house in Pittsburgh, Pennsyl- vania, during the summer before my senior year at Mather Col- lege. The curtain rises.

Our story begins with wasps. Like the head of a grandmother, a grey and wrinkled nest was perched high in the corner of the Arts & Crafts Shack of Camp Shalom, a Jewish day camp in the Pittsburgh area. It was pretty much Shalom’s inactive volcano— about eight years back somebody got stung but nobody else, and eight years back it was a kid nobody liked. So went the rumor.

But the Stock twins, Abby and Pinchas Stock, were readying the Arts & Crafts Shack for the onslaught of little Jews and Jewettes. They were scheduled to be counselors and were earn- ing some extra money cleaning up the camp, a job which no- body but the Stock twins thought was anything but lounging around the grounds, taking a dip in the lake, and shooing gnats away from the nightly barbecue. The Stock twins took their job with a rabbinical seriousness. The Stock twins thought that they should clean up the camp, and when they saw what first looked like Grandma Stock, decapitated at last, they figured they’d bet- ter get that wasps’ nest down before it hurt somebody.

For the camp-wide barbecues, the fat and friendly lesbians who worked as cooks used the mausoleum-sized brick barbe- cues by the side of the lake, but for counselors-only get- togethers there was a bright blue kettle on wheels. Abby Stock wheeled it over to the Shack while Pinchas found a stepladder and a broom with whiskers so dusty that the act of sweeping with it was a textbook example of dramatic irony. Having gleaned from somewhere that smoke was the thing that one did to wasps, the twins got a fire going in the bright blue kettle and threw some construction paper on the grill. A thin pillar of smoke—Pinchas, something of a Torah nerd, made a Moses

joke—wafted its way toward the nest whose wrinkles suddenly seemed to be wincing in distaste. The Stock twins thought about two handfuls of paper should do it. The Stock twins thought that the few wasps hummingbirding around the nest were prob- ably the last couple of survivors. Pinchas went up the ladder.

Angry wasps clouded the air in strict arrow-shaped forma- tions more like angry wasps in cartoons on television than you’d think. The arrow pointed first at Pinchas, who fell from the ladder and led the wasps to his partner in crime. Both of them were so covered in stings that their faces looked like seed cakes. Plus the falling ladder broke Abby’s leg. The wasps made a quick lap around the Shack before returning to the nest, so that by the time the lounging counselors arrived on the scene it looked like pain had just
descended
on the Stock twins, out of nowhere.

Pittsburgh Bug-B-Gone, who rid Temple Ner Tamid (“Eter- nal Light”) of the cockroach problem spoiling their kosher ca- tering facilities, took care of the nest, but the problem of finding two more counselors at such short notice fell to the Head of Staff, a theater student who hadn’t been accepted into any sum- mer stock programs and so was spending the summer exiled in his hometown. Chastened, he was living in the sweaty bedroom of his youth and after dark would stroke himself remembering a girl from high school who would pull over halfway home from cast parties to bring him to a shuddering ovation in the backseat of her family’s throbbing car. So when the Stock twins were peppered he didn’t have to look further than his own sticky body. He was buzzing with panting reunion fantasies when he called Cyn, but he had to put his acting skills to use when he said of course she could bring her boyfriend Joseph, and that’s

how Cyn and I ended up living in her parents’ house in Pitts- burgh, Pennsylvania, during the summer before my senior year at Mather College. The curtain rises.

Our story begins with a golem, a figure in Jewish myth—sort of a Jewish lie, sort of a Jewish truth. Just as God, breathing into clay, created something that was in the shape of, but not as good as, Himself, man can breathe into clay and make some- thing man-shaped but not man. Or in this case, not woman.

The trick, of course, is the ritual. The mythology of the golem sprung up in the sixteenth century in Worms, Germany, when a beleaguered rabbi, exhausted by the usual government evil, created a new ritual and with it a seven-foot-tall man made of clay. In many ways Pittsburgh is a perfect place for what was surely the first American golem, because although stories of the ritual differ, they usually say that river mud is the best flesh.

The sixteenth-century Worms fad in Jew-hating was a fairly common one in those days: the blood libel. Jews were accused of killing Christian babies and using their blood to make un- leavened bread for Passover, a charge that’s particularly laugh- able if you’ve ever had even a bite of dry, tasteless matzah. This is a reason why the Glass home is also a perfect locale for a golem revival, because Mrs. Glass cooked her delicious meals using mysterious ingredients obtained at dawn at the downtown market. Who knows what was in that sauce, or what creature previously owned those bulbous objects, rendered unreadable by carmelization?

According to the records, some Christians would kill their own babies, break into rabbis’ homes and place the baby-bodies in the basement, returning the next morning with a mob. Now
that’s
anti-semitism. Rabbis set up patrols to block this baby- planting, but all the Christians would have to do was toss the infant corpses directly into the rabbis’ arms and return the next morning with a mob. The ghetto-hood watch wasn’t working; the congregation wanted a better guardian.

The clay is laid out in the shape of a man and the creator is dressed in white. Candles are lit and the body is circled a num- ber of times argued over extensively in horrifically dull texts on Jewish mysticism. The prayers are of course also in dispute, but my favorite is an alphabetical one sung by a hopelessly Gentile tenor in
Golem,
one of the productions that summer at the Pitts- burgh Opera: “Ah, By Clay Destroy Evil Forces, Golem, Help Israel: Justice!” This brought the clay to an obedient, powerful and creepy life.

The fact it’s the alphabet is worth noting. The golem, like so many aspects of Judaism, is inundated with the power of the Word. God’s name is a secret—abbreviated “Ha Shem,” or “The Name,” most of the time. In the beginning, of course, was the Word. It’s generally agreed that a short prayer, inscribed on a scroll of paper, should be placed in the golem’s mouth; if he ever speaks, the Word of God tumbles out and the golem turns back into clay. Pretend
you’re
an evil Christian, sneaking through the ghettos of Worms with a dead baby, when a seven- foot silent figure of clay steps out of the shadows. No way are you returning the next morning with a mob. That’s the power of the Word. The name of the beleaguered rabbi was Rabbi Liva.

The name of the river from which the flesh was taken was the Moldau River. The name of the first golem was Joseph. The name of the story where all this is told is The Wondrous Tale That Was Widely Known As The Sorrows Of A Daughter.

Cyn had not the slightest interest in her religious heritage, but one time we were caught in a freak thunderstorm while walking around the campus cemetery, one of those picturesque old ones where people are always doing rubbings. We huddled underneath a tree, getting damp, then soaked, then horny: we did a rubbing. Cyn always preferred being on top and I always submitted, even when that meant my bare body pressed into mud and her hair and face dripping on me like a wet tree. Even when she shifted her position and moved her hands from the mud to my chest, leaving a thick handprint of clay on each shoulder, I didn’t mind. As she constricted around me I felt like I was coming to life, obedient to her will. She stuck a clay- stained finger into my mouth and though the taste was bitter I was afraid to say anything and ruin it. The rain stopped but we didn’t; I was afraid that somebody might see us, stepping out of the shadows on their way somewhere. But I didn’t speak. I’d do anything for her.

And that’s how Cyn and I ended up living in her parents’ house in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during the summer before my senior year at Mather. The curtain rises.

ACT I, SCENE ONE

The set for the first scene would probably win something in
Operagoer
magazine’s Annual Audience Awards. In the fore- ground is an expensive garden, not quite in bloom but full of promise. There are a handful of enormous ceramic pots, large enough for a child’s first bath, with small lime trees waving in the summer breeze like the hands of a spindly pianist, warming up. In fact the whole place is warming up: the flaccid hose, ready to spring into action if somebody pumps in water; bags of pot- ting soil, swollen pregnant with earthy minerals and expensive dung; the prongs of polished tools, catching the glare of the sharply-angled lights installed for security reasons; a beckoning watering can and packets and packets and packets of seeds. In Pittsburgh, it’s the heat
and
the humidity, so although the soil looks parched, the leaves are moist from the evening’s conden- sation. If you touch them they feel like showered skin. The propsmistress accomplishes this look with a thin, clear paste— the same stuff they use to make those new-album posters stick to construction sites in seedier parts of town.