sheets and stretched out across marble slabs. They smack them and knead them and push them around, they slowly twist their limbs as though to remove them in a piece from their sockets- I am hypnotized, but continue to follow after my father as we pass alongside the pool, a small green cube of heart-stopping ice water, and come at last to the steam room.
The moment he pushes open the door the place speaks to me of prehistoric times, earlier even than the era of the cavemen and lake dwellers that I have studied in school, a time when above the oozing bog that was the earth, swirling white gasses choked out the sunlight, and aeons passed while the planet was drained for Man. I lose touch instantaneously with that ass-licking little boy who runs home after school with his A's in his hand, the little over-earnest innocent endlessly in search of the key to that unfathomable mystery, his mother's approbation, and am back in some sloppy watery time, before there were families such as we know them, before there were toilets and tragedies such as we know them, a time of amphibious creatures, plunging brainless hulking things, with wet meaty flanks and steaming torsos. It is as though all the Jewish men ducking beneath the cold dribble of shower off in the corner of the steam room, then lumbering back for more of the thick dense suffocating vapors, it is as though they have ridden the time-machine back to an age when they existed as some herd of Jewish animals, whose only utterance is oy, oy . . . for this is the sound they make as they drag themselves from the shower into the heavy gush of fumes. They appear, at long last, my father and his fellow sufferers, to have returned to the habitat in which they can be natural. A place without goyim and women.
I stand at attention between his legs as he coats me from head to toe with a thick lather of soap- and eye with admiration the baggy substantiality of what overhangs the marble bench upon which he is seated. His scrotum is like the long wrinkled face of some old man with an egg tucked into each of his sagging jowls- while mine might hang from the wrist of some little girl's dolly like a teeny pink purse. And as for hi s shlong, to me, with that fingertip of a prick that my mother likes to refer to in public (once, okay, but that once will last a lifetime) as my little thing, his shlong brings to mind the fire hoses coiled along the corridors at school. Shlong: the word somehow catches exactly the brutishness, the meatishness, that I admire so, the sheer mindless, weighty, and unseltconscious dangle of that living piece of hose through which he passes streams of water as thick and strong as rope-while I deliver forth slender yellow threads that my euphemistic mother calls a sis. A sis, I think, is undoubtedly what my sister makes, little yellow threads that you can sew with . . . Do you want to make a nice sis? she asks me-when I want to make a torrent, I want to make a flood: I want like he does to shift the tides of the toilet bowl! Jack, my mother calls to him, would you close that door, please? Some example you're setting for you know who. But if only that had been so, Mother! If only you-know-who could have found some inspiration in what's-his-name's coarseness! If only I could have nourished myself upon the depths of his vulgarity, instead of that too becoming a source of shame. Shame and shame and shame and shame-every place I turn something else to be ashamed of.
We are in my Uncle Nate's clothing store on Springfield Avenue in Newark. I want a bathing suit with a built-in athletic support. I am eleven years old and that is my secret: I want a jock. I know not to say anything, I just know to keep my mouth shut, but then how do you get it if you don't ask for it? Uncle Nate, a spiffy dresser with a mustache, removes from his showcase a pair of little boy’s trunks, the exact style I have always worn. He
The moment he pushes open the door the place speaks to me of prehistoric times, earlier even than the era of the cavemen and lake dwellers that I have studied in school, a time when above the oozing bog that was the earth, swirling white gasses choked out the sunlight, and aeons passed while the planet was drained for Man. I lose touch instantaneously with that ass-licking little boy who runs home after school with his A's in his hand, the little over-earnest innocent endlessly in search of the key to that unfathomable mystery, his mother's approbation, and am back in some sloppy watery time, before there were families such as we know them, before there were toilets and tragedies such as we know them, a time of amphibious creatures, plunging brainless hulking things, with wet meaty flanks and steaming torsos. It is as though all the Jewish men ducking beneath the cold dribble of shower off in the corner of the steam room, then lumbering back for more of the thick dense suffocating vapors, it is as though they have ridden the time-machine back to an age when they existed as some herd of Jewish animals, whose only utterance is oy, oy . . . for this is the sound they make as they drag themselves from the shower into the heavy gush of fumes. They appear, at long last, my father and his fellow sufferers, to have returned to the habitat in which they can be natural. A place without goyim and women.
I stand at attention between his legs as he coats me from head to toe with a thick lather of soap- and eye with admiration the baggy substantiality of what overhangs the marble bench upon which he is seated. His scrotum is like the long wrinkled face of some old man with an egg tucked into each of his sagging jowls- while mine might hang from the wrist of some little girl's dolly like a teeny pink purse. And as for hi s shlong, to me, with that fingertip of a prick that my mother likes to refer to in public (once, okay, but that once will last a lifetime) as my little thing, his shlong brings to mind the fire hoses coiled along the corridors at school. Shlong: the word somehow catches exactly the brutishness, the meatishness, that I admire so, the sheer mindless, weighty, and unseltconscious dangle of that living piece of hose through which he passes streams of water as thick and strong as rope-while I deliver forth slender yellow threads that my euphemistic mother calls a sis. A sis, I think, is undoubtedly what my sister makes, little yellow threads that you can sew with . . . Do you want to make a nice sis? she asks me-when I want to make a torrent, I want to make a flood: I want like he does to shift the tides of the toilet bowl! Jack, my mother calls to him, would you close that door, please? Some example you're setting for you know who. But if only that had been so, Mother! If only you-know-who could have found some inspiration in what's-his-name's coarseness! If only I could have nourished myself upon the depths of his vulgarity, instead of that too becoming a source of shame. Shame and shame and shame and shame-every place I turn something else to be ashamed of.
We are in my Uncle Nate's clothing store on Springfield Avenue in Newark. I want a bathing suit with a built-in athletic support. I am eleven years old and that is my secret: I want a jock. I know not to say anything, I just know to keep my mouth shut, but then how do you get it if you don't ask for it? Uncle Nate, a spiffy dresser with a mustache, removes from his showcase a pair of little boy’s trunks, the exact style I have always worn. He
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