I walk over to the console TV and pick up the gun. It’s small, and my 10-year-old hand wraps easily around it. I slip my right index finger neatly into the loop and press gently against the trigger, not pushing down but holding it the way Michael Douglas does in “The Streets of San Francisco.” The gun is silver and shiny, snub-nosed and Saturday Night Special come to mind now, though at the time phrases like those don’t exist in my grade-school vocabulary.

 

 

 

 

 

With my back to Debbie, I ease my finger off the trigger and open my hand on the grip, willing myself not to move too quickly.”

I stand next to the TV, gripping the gun. It’s heavy, surprisingly so, and the metal feels cold, like a fresh can of Pepsi on a hot summer day. I raise the gun in front of me, straighten my arm, and turn and face my friend, Debbie. I point the gun at her chest and squeeze the trigger, but it’s harder to move than I thought and the metal won’t budge.

“You know that’s a real gun,” she says, giggling.

Only I don’t know. Why would I?

Debbie is a year older, but we’re in the same grade. We have the day off from school and we’re spending it at her house. I told my parents Debbie’s mom would be there, but her mother works and Debbie always stays home alone. I said yes when Debbie called because I didn’t want to tell her that I’m not allowed to stay by ourselves, and I would never invite her to our house because I’m not allowed to watch TV during the day. Debbie says we can watch “Ryan’s Hope” and “All My Children,” maybe even “General Hospital.” We’ll eat candy and chips for lunch.

A few minutes before we find the gun, we’re standing in the kitchen, trying to decide what to do, when Debbie opens the door that leads to the basement.

“Want to look around?” she asks. “Karl’s at work.”

Debbie’s 19-year-old brother, Karl, lives in their basement. Today is the first time Debbie invites me to go down the dark, narrow stairway.

The basement is gloomy, the only light comes from high windows that open to the blacktop driveway. It’s set up like an apartment; wood paneling; stained, brown shag carpet; an old couch with holes in the arms and brown corduroy cushions that form a perfect V where it sags in the middle. The console TV is against the opposite wall. A square of sunlight hits it like a beam, illuminating the gun.

When we go down the stairs, Debbie’s dachshund, Schatzie, follows us only as far as the first step, her front paws on the stair and hind legs still on the kitchen floor. Debbie gets to the basement and whistles for the dog to follow her, but Schatzie won’t move. Instead, Schatzie backs up into the kitchen and whines. The dog understands what Debbie and I know all too well.

“If Karl finds out we’re down here, he’ll kill us,” Debbie says.

Danger permeates Debbie’s house, in her older sister Ingrid’s cigarettes, in the tall, brown bottles of German beer her dad drinks day and night, and in the motorcycle and sidecar that sit in pieces in the garage. Debbie talks about boys at school in a way I don’t quite understand, and when we climb the ladder to the loft her dad made by laying sheets of plywood along the beams of their garage, she teases me about my clothes and shushes me when I sing along to the weekly Top 40 on her AM radio.

Debbie tells me a lot of things that summer that I’m not ready to know, like it’s cooler to mouth the words to songs rather than sing them out loud; that a French kiss means using your tongue; that after you light a cigarette you should blow the smoke sideways and not straight in front of you. That’s what Ingrid does when she talks to Karl’s friends.

So when Debbie tells me the gun is real, I smirk. Having a real gun in her house is just one more thing Debbie knows that I don’t, and today I refuse to give her the satisfaction.

“No kidding,” I say.

I lower my arms, turn around and put the gun on top of the TV. With my back to Debbie, I ease my finger off the trigger and open my hand on the grip, willing myself not to move too quickly. It’s hard, because my hand suddenly feels like it’s burning.

I decide I want out of the basement.

“Did you hear that?” I ask. It’s quiet, but I turn my head as if to follow a sound. Debbie plays along. Her brother is supposed to check on us on his lunch break. He works at the gas station down the street.

“Let’s get out of here,” Debbie says, running past me and taking the steps two at a time. I follow her, bolting up the stairs and slamming the basement door behind me.

Schatzie watches us from under the kitchen table, ears flat against her head. She puts one paw forward, then another, then bolts across the floor and into the dining room. The sound of her nails clicking against the linoleum makes us both jump. We look at each other, then burst out laughing.

It takes a minute for us to catch our breath.

“Do you want something to eat?” she asks.

“I want another Pepsi,” I say.

Debbie pulls two cans from the refrigerator and picks up her sister’s pack of cigarettes from the table. We go outside, and we don’t talk about the gun.

A year later we’re no longer friends. Instead, Debbie and a girl named Angela start hanging out on the playground after school, showing off hickeys they get from junior high boys. They steal stuff from my desk and leave anonymous notes in my locker, pretending to be my secret admirer. In high school, there will be rumors about them skipping school and one of them, I forget who, gets pregnant. In eleventh grade, Debbie will drop out and not come back.

But on the afternoon of the day we find the gun, Debbie walks outside and shouts something over her shoulder.

“Don’t forget the matches.”

I grab them off the table and slam the door behind me.

Ellen Fowler Hummel writes creative nonfiction and the occasional short story. She is managing editor of mutterhood.com, an online literary and photography magazine that she cofounded, and she writes about creativity on her blog, Jump the Page. 

Photo by Ellen Blum Barish

I was standing naked in a bathroom with a stranger pointing a needle at my penis and I thought, you know, life is weird.  Don’t get the wrong idea, I am a Southern gentleman.  The stranger was a rabbi, actually a mohel, but my Johnson was definitely in his hands and he was absolutely about to poke it.

 

All I wanted was Barbie’s Dream House and a set of decent Shabbat candlesticks.”

It didn’t matter that he was a man of God, that this was his job, or that I had paid for this service.  Having anyone direct a sharp object at your privates is at best an unsettling feeling.  I looked at the florescent lighting above us and all I could think was, “Oh! The places you will go!”

I didn’t necessarily plan on ending up in a bathroom with an old man cradling my junk while chanting Hebrew.  How could I?  I am from the Mississippi Delta, where the singing of Hebrew of any sort isn’t exactly on the list of traditional activities.  Judaism is pretty scarce in the Delta, and becoming a Jew certainly isn’t on anyone’s bucket list. The people I grew up with want to find a new place to go deer hunting and they cross-stitch Bible verses onto pillows.  I’ve always felt like a bit of an alien, but it’s fair to say that voluntary ritual circumcision is a little off the beaten path.  On the other hand, when I think back to my early, more impressionable years, no one should be surprised.  Where else could I possibly be?

Judaism came to me the way it would for anyone strangled with Southern fire and brimstone.  It was beamed down from satellites and zapped across cotton farms and eventually found its way into my living room and onto my television set.  No, there wasn’t a weird telethon on the Shalom Network. The chosen people paid me a house call via my babysitter:  HBO.  There is no proselytizing like marinating in the glow of a TV when you’re eight years old. It was there that I found my people.

What I obviously mean to say is that Barbra Streisand, that is, Yentl, had a very lasting and powerful influence over my life choices.  I am living proof of what watching Yentl 36,000 times can do to a person. To my little virgin eyes, she was the most amazing person who had ever lived.  We were a perfect match, Babs and I.  She sang and danced and talked to God with candles while cross dressing in the forest, and so I sang and danced and talked to God with candles while cross dressing in a locked bathroom.

The more I watched the movie, the more obsessed I became.   The movie is about a young girl who disguises herself as a boy so that she can study Torah. I was some sort of Yentl in reverse.  I eventually stopped hiding in the bathroom to reenact scenes and brought my show to our living room.  I needed a bigger stage and a more complicated wardrobe and hair selection than bathrobes and beach towels could offer.  I started hijacking my mother’s dresses, nightgowns, and heels.   My floor show was about a young boy from Arkansas who had to disguise himself as a girl so that he could openly adore Mandy Patinkin.  I would get myself all wrapped up in my mother’s overcoat, hat and scarves like a freezing immigrant from Eastern Europe.  I’d stand there in front of the television picturing myself on a boat coming from the old country.  I looked just like a mini-version of Babs.  I’d sing the final number over and over until my Mom had had enough.  These are the things that happen when you tell an only child to go entertain himself.

The final scene of Yentl is my favorite. It’s when Barbra sings, With all there is – why settle for just a piece of sky? It knocks me out every time I hear it. I’d think to myself, “Don’t you worry. I won’t!”

My parents were perplexed.  They were good Christian people.  What had they done to deserve a cross-dressing, Jewish eight year old?  They focused my religious instruction and plied me with every masculine toy they could get their hands on – basketballs, Bibles, guns, a model of the Millennium Falcon – anything and everything that eight-year-old boys were supposed to play with in 1983.  I was disgusted.  All I wanted was Barbie’s Dream House and a set of decent Shabbat Candlesticks.

None of these parental tricks worked, of course.  I found sports baffling. Guns aren’t pretty. I had been praying for years begging to be turned into a girl and it got me nowhere, so clearly God was useless. I was heavy into Star Wars; I just wanted that metal bikini for myself, not stare at the person wearing it.  Instead, somehow I reached the point where it was no longer acceptable for a boy to wear Smurfette gym shoes and a homemade Wonder Woman tiara.

Growing up is hard and being different is a challenge.  Kids are the meanest, especially if how you express yourself cannot be ignored.  It’s damn near impossible to suddenly not be feminine or sound like whatever boys are supposed to sound like.  Peer pressure forced me to pack away my Yentl obsession – the nightgown, the towel hair – and close my living room drag show.  I focused my attention elsewhere, namely on making it out of my hometown in one piece.  I made it my mission to try blending in, to be invisible.

It’s that last part that I could never wrap my little head around.  I’d let my guard down for one minute and the next thing I knew Tallulah Bankhead or some other glitter bomb would come flying out of my mouth.  I was the gayest.  And like anyone with a flair for the dramatic, I was led kicking and screaming to a theatre department.  It was there in college while fluffing my dreams of staring in Yentl Part Two that I discovered the next best thing to Barbra Streisand: a whole gaggle of Barbras.  Yes, I found a college theatre department’s most renewable resource:  Jewish girls.  I was completely enamored.  I watched as they sang all the songs and felt all the feelings.  They were everything I wanted to be:  loud, brave, and busty.  Those girls accepted me and took me in as one of their own.  They reconnected me with the mini-Yentl I was as a kid and I vowed to be just like them one day.

While my characteristic Talmudic shrug, hand talking, and generalized anxiety disorder usually keep my Christian past a secret, I quietly think of my Yentl years when questions arise.  I wish I could tell you that I had a far more mystical Jewish beginning than dancing in my mother’s nightgown while listening to “Papa Can You Hear Me” on repeat.  Let’s be honest.  That sounds far more like the birth of a drag queen than a Jewish American Princess.  It certainly isn’t the sort of story you share with a panel of rabbis if you want them to approve your conversion.

That’s right, my Jewishness had to be questioned and reviewed by a board of rabbis.  How Jewish is that?  I didn’t just get to say, “Hey, everybody, look at me, bust out the Manischewitz.  I’m a Jew now!”  No, in spite of my Jew Fro and affinity for deli meats, I had to actually do some work.  Converting is more complicated than a simple prayer or declaration of allegiance to matzoh balls.  It is not easy, becoming Jewish is a full time job; especially for a Southern Baptist.  I had to read and study Jewish literature and immerse myself in all things Heeb as if I were defending a dissertation.  It was intense.  What a downer.  I mean have you read The Diary of Anne Frank?  My conversion was a yearlong process complete with essays and a monthly meeting with a rabbi.  I was prepared for the reading and endless questions.  Yentl is my favorite movie, so I knew to be ready for the inquisition.  What I wasn’t expecting was for my yearlong home-schooled religious studies program to culminate in a penis slicing and skinny-dip.

To be fair, you should know that I am circumcised.  I was before I converted.  That happened many, many moons ago.  I suddenly feel like you should all buy me dinner.  The circumcision is considered to be the physical symbol of the relationship between God and the Jewish people, so it is customary to perform the ritual on new Jews as a way to affirm this new bond.  What this means is that I paid an old man a lot of money to sing some Hebrew while poking my wiener until it bled.  A drop of blood was collected and then presented to a group of rabbis.  This is where I should admit that this ceremony is suggested and totally not required.  That’s right.  I’m a gangsta Jew.  I got my penis carved for my people.

Surprisingly, that’s not the most awkward part of my transformation.  After the penis poke, I had to disrobe in front of my rabbi and give myself a sort of Jewish baptism while chanting Hebrew prayers.  I’m clumsy and hate swimming, so it was a lot like giving a cat a bath.

Life is weird.  Who knows why we choose the things we choose.   All I can tell you is that when I watched Yentl all those years ago, I knew two things instantly:  I am Jewish, and men are attractive.  Don’t be nervous.  Watching Yentl won’t make you Jewish, just a little gay.  I was obsessed with the movie as a kid because in Yentl’s story, I saw myself.  I knew, even at eight, that I was different.  Knowing who you are is the easy part.  Finding a way to be the person you are supposed to be (and learning to love that person in spite of everything you’re taught), that is a whole other universe.

Maybe it’s a coincidence or a side effect of my Streisand obsession, but the people who got me to the other side are Jewish.  When you find your tribe, you have to hold on to them, and that’s exactly what I did.

Jeremy Owens is the creator, host and producer of “You’re Being Ridiculous,” a quarterly reading series on Chicago’s Far North Side. He is a food writer for Gapers Block and Oy!Chicago. He has been featured in JUF Magazine and Story Club Magazine.

Photo by Ellen Blum Barish. Copyright 2015.

 

 

Every so often, I  have a dream about searching for the jewelry that I lost in the Fox River when I was young.

 

If they could speak they would say, “We don’t belong here, Birthday Girl.””

In my dream, a gold chariot is drawn by six white horses. I am at the helm, dressed in a two-piece bathing suit without color and black, high-top gym shoes. My kinky blond tresses fly wildly in all directions. In my hand is a whip held high above my head like a chubby Wonder Woman ready to conquer the murky waters. The force of the horse’s gallops splits the river in two. The river bottom is muddy and filled with empty beer and pop bottles, inedible river clams and snails and pieces of my jewelry brightly shine through the water. There’s my star of David on a gold chain, my silver identification bracelet, my ankle bracelet, my birth stone ring and my gold initial ring waiting to be rescued.  If they could speak, they would say, “We don’t belong here, Birthday Girl.”

My birthday is in August and, along with family, I always celebrated it at Fox River Heights where we vacationed in the summer. My parents bought me jewelry for my birthdays, always something I specifically requested. I suppose that’s when a certain character flaw showed up. Every year, that special gift disappeared shortly after I received it.

The star of David that hung around my neck, when last seen, took a dive with me off some teenage boy’s shoulders. The dive was magnificent! I was triumphant! However, all that excitement left me within seconds when suddenly, the top of my two-piece bathing suit fell off and, at the same time, my birthday necklace broke away from my neck. Now both were sinking into the dark river water. I was horrified. I retrieved the suit top and struggled to put it back on while hiding under the water. My necklace is still at the bottom of the river.

For my tenth birthday I begged for a birthstone ring. When my parents gave it to me, it came with instructions. “Do not wear the ring until it is sized,” my mother said. “And that’s final! But know-it-all me wore it anyway. I got into a swimming race with another teenage boy, and yes, the ring slipped off. To make matters worse, what’s-his-name won the race. I cried more about that than the loss of my birthday gift.

“Trudi, are you just stupid or what?” my mother asked me.

I told her I was sorry but the truth was I was more interested in the teenage boy.

The summer I turned eleven, ankle bracelets were the rage. It was the must-have of 1945. The first day I wore the ankle bracelet, I couldn’t believe it was still secured around my sweaty ankle when I went to sleep. I remember thanking God and asking him to let me wear it forever.

I love to swim. My appreciation of the sport began soon after my mother tossed me in the river and shouted, “sink or swim” when I was four.  I screamed, and when no one jumped in after me, I paddled like a puppy and rescued myself. My mother had been a swimmer all her life. She was even a lifeguard who saved a young boy from drowning. Under her influence, and the many Esther William’s movies we saw together, I fantasized for a swimmers’ life. I dreamed of winning swim contests and saw myself in water ballet shows, and I was pretty good at it, too. I could dive off any board and was ready to compete.

I challenged a popular teenage boy I had my eyes on and he decided to go along with me. I was hoping my win might include a kiss. I’ll show off my syncopated leg work, I thought. He’ll be in awe! I alternated between the back stroke, the breast stroke and my near perfect crawl. Ten minutes into the race, my left ankle was no longer sporting my prized possession. It was as though the river knew I was there and was waiting.  The ankle bracelet became buried in the mud.

We were celebrating my twelfth birthday on the sacred grounds of my summers when my parents, at long last, gave up on me. “Trudi,” my mother said. “You don’t deserve a birthday present.” But she gave me a beautiful gold initial ring I had asked for and warmly told me, “We’ll kill you if you lose it.”

I lost the ring and survived near death.

My dream appears less and less, but I do reminisce about the days I spent in the river when my fearless heart was set on my dreams.

Trudi Goodman is an abstract expressionist painter whose work has been juried into The Art Institute of Chicago Sales and Rental Gallery and hangs in Chicago’s Willis Tower. Her essay, “Whose Looking Anyway?” was published in the “Seasons of Our Lives” anthology.

 Photo by Ellen Blum Barish