Vignettes from Rehovot
Posted by Jew from Jersey
12 January 2022When I was kid, we lived in an apartment overlooking a park known locally as “plastic park.” When I was about eleven, I overheard some high school boys talking in the park below. It was late at night. The neighborhood was asleep and although the boys were probably not talking loudly, I could hear much of what they said. I recognized one of them as the older brother of my friend. I also recognized the voice of one of the other boys. I heard them speak the name of the third boy, but it wasn’t a name I could put a face too. My friend’s older brother said to the other boy I recognized: “I would rather be a virgin than make a fool of myself in bed like you.” He said this in English.
This was almost forty years ago. Stevie Wonder’s “I just called to say I love you” was a huge hit. As an American, when you say: “The British once ruled this country,” you’re talking about hundreds of years ago. But as an Israeli, the British had ruled the country less than forty years before Stevie Wonder came out with that song. And a similar amount of time has passed since then. It makes one feel old indeed.
I remember the exact words my friend’s brother had used. At that age, I thought about women a lot. I knew most of them had sex with men, but not with me or with any boys my age. In fact, even with older boys and with men, women always seemed to act as if sex didn’t exist and couldn’t be mentioned, and yet most of these women must be having it, with someone else. It was like living in the middle of a huge lake, and being constantly thirsty and fearing shame and ridicule for even mentioning the existence of water or the need for it. I couldn’t understand how it was possible to get from here to there. It certainly made me feel very foolish. What struck me so much about my friend’s brother’s words was that he was implying that his buddy was a fool even after going to bed with a woman. That possibility had never occurred to me before. I had just assumed that once one got that far in life, one was no longer a fool.
After what seemed like eons, but was really only a few short years, I was myself in high school, the same one my friend’s brother and his friends had attended, just up the street. A number of my friends had had some sexual experiences with girls by then. I was curious about this, although I did not envy most of them. There is a certain amount of push and pull in all sexual dynamics and an interplay between the two, but my impression was that, with the exception of a few natural players, most of these guys were relying a lot more on the push than on the pull. They were simply horny and persistent enough that they eventually got to cop an awkward feel or put their tongue in some girl’s mouth. Occasionally, one of them might get “lucky,” but even from hearing them tell it, it didn’t sound like I was missing much.
My suspicions were confirmed when a girl I was friendly with who had slept with some of my friends told me about it. I knew these guys, I loved these guys, and the way she was talking about them was just humiliating. It wasn’t that anything she said was so horrible in itself. It was that she was telling it to me. She obviously didn’t respect them. I lost a lot of respect for them myself after hearing these things, but it also made me lose some respect for her, not because she was promiscuous, but because she herself didn’t respect many of the guys she slept with. It seemed to me that by laying bare their faults like this, she was also humiliating herself. So how could I respect her? I hate to admit it, but I guess when all is said and done I’m really just a prude at heart.
All these years later, I really owe that girl some credit, for my sake if not for hers. She’s the only female who told me honestly about such things.
When we had been eleven, my friend, the one whose older brother I had overheard in the park, told me he had asked his “mum” if girls got erections too. “No,” his mother had said (he quoted her in English), “they run a mile.” We both laughed, but I also envied him being able to talk with his mother about such things.
I often say I got a crash course in women from the players I knew later in the army, but I owe that girl in high school a debt of gratitude as well. Some of the tales of shame she told about my friends were not surprising, but some things were news to me. For instance: it turns out women don’t appreciate guys getting all romantic and “lovey-dovey” in bed. Most guys will just naturally assume that’s what they’re supposed to do.
This same girl had also slept with one of my player friends, but she talked of him completely differently, if at all. If his name ever came up, the only kind of things she would say were: “Does he talk about me?” or “Do you think he’ll call?” I learned a lot from that, too.
She also told me how easy it was to get things she knew she was not entitled to in all spheres of life simply by making goo-goo eyes at men of all ages.
It’s funny how for all the years I lived in Israel, I mostly read books in English. I built up a vast English vocabulary and good spelling skills, but I still, to this day, mispronounce many English words because I only know them from the printed page. And while Israel is far more cosmopolitan than most people imagine, and I met and befriended people there from all over the world, a disproportionate number of my friends and confidants were native speakers of English. I actually conversed with these people in Hebrew for the most part, but the fact that they had grown up in English-speaking countries was probably not a coincidence. Both my friend whom I knew at eleven and the girl I keep mentioning from high school fall into this category.
And here’s something else those two people, who as far as I know never met, had in common: both their mothers died of cancer when they were quite young. My friend’s mother died when he was about fourteen. I remember her funeral. Soon after, he moved with his father and brother to New Jersey, a state of the Union that had played a role in my own life and would again.
The girl’s mother had died when she had been even younger. It’s funny when I think about it now, but I don’t remember that she ever even mentioned her mother. She lived with her father, but I got the impression they were not close. I was at her house a number of times, but only remember seeing him once. They lived in an upscale part of town. She had two older sisters who were already married when I knew her. In later years, I was speaking with another local English-speaker, an older man who was a teacher at our high school. I mentioned her and he said, “Oh yes, the little girl who was left to grow up on her own.”
It is often observed that it is easier for children to make friends than for adults. Adults generally only make friends with people they work with or belong to an organization with, where the friendship is focused on a shared goal of some sort. Children, by comparison seem to be able to make friends just for the sake of being friends. But I think childhood friends, especially in the teen years, are indeed engaged in a common goal. That goal is: growing up, something that requires immense human resources and shared effort. And in the teen years, this is an effort parents are less able to shoulder. This is particularly hard for young people like my two friends, orphaned of their mothers. But in some sense, we are all left at some point to grow up on our own.
So the inability to stay in touch with childhood friends when we are grown is not really so different than the inability to stay in touch with former co-workers, parishioners, or army buddies. The goal we strived together to achieve has been accomplished, or at least it has been accomplished as much as it ever will be.