My Sadomasochistic Seder

My Sadomasochistic Seder

By

Mark Jordan


If I was an ethnographer, my inventory of the items at my first Seder might have gone something like this: one piece of romaine lettuce, a roasted shank bone, two celery sticks, one ten inch long pink dildo (two inches thick), an egg, a small metal testical vice, a sweet, lumpy paste, that looked and tasted like concrete, one ten foot long black whip, grated horseradish, a large ripe California orange, and four leather restraint straps.

Of course all of these things didn’t appear of the Seder Plate, but they were all there on the day of my first Jewish holiday experience.

But first, let’s back things up a bit. For all you non-Jews (including myself), what exactly is a Seder? Based on the list mentioned, you might think that this is some sick, twisted Jewish holiday in which you get to pour matzo ball soup on naked bodies while cavorting around in a relentless orgy. Unfortunately it’s not. Not usually. Hopefully. The Passover Seder is a Jewish holiday in which family and friends come together to remember the story of the Jewish exodus from Egypt. During the meal the guests eat six different food items symbolizing this story, pausing to say prayers before each item is eaten. The Passover “Seder” is the plate on which these items are arranged.

Because I’m not Jewish (despite popular belief) I’d never been to one of these events, so when my friend Amber invited me to her friend’s Seder, I thought it would be an excellent opportunity to gain some insight into an important cultural celebration.

“The girl who’s throwing it is really sweet, plus there’s going to be lots of interesting people there. And afterwards we might go to a club,” Amber told me.

“A club? For the Seder?” I asked.

“Not exactly for the Seder, but I have some friends that are coming that might want to go to a place for fun afterwards.”

It seemed a little unusual to me but I agreed, and we met at her friend’s apartment in Santa Monica. When I arrived a small group of guests were watching “Moses” on TV.

“Let my people go!” he shouted and the group laughed and clinked glasses of wine.

“My friend’s a ‘Reformed Jew,’” Amber explained, noting my glance.

“A reformed Jew? Does that mean she’s a Christian?”

“No.” Amber rolled her eyes. “It just means that they are more liberal with some of the Jewish traditions. They just have a more modern interpretation of Judaism.”

“Ah, got ya.”

I’m not really familiar with how most Seders go, but I guess one of the more Reformed practices at our dinner was the fact that our host, who was female, led the meal and the prayers. To start, each of us got a glass of wine, some matzo ball soup. Then, as our host explained the significance of each of the food items on the Seder plate we would say a prayer and pass the tray containing the items around the table for a small portion.

For instance, my host passed around a purple paste, explaining that it signified the bitterness and hardship of the Jewish people in Egypt. Failing to notice that the item’s metaphoric significance directly corresponded to its taste, I took a large scoopful of the purply paste and dumped it in my mouth, gagging almost instantly. It took me a second to realize that this purplish crap was actually horseradish, and I discreetly “wiped” my mouth, spitting out into my napkin.

Overall food at a Seder is a pretty bland (or bitter) affair. Which I guess is really the point. You don’t want to be eating foie gras while you are remembering the hardship of your ancestors! I suppose it’s just the lot of religious food in general to be unappetizing. The Eucharist in the Catholics Church of my youth always seemed to taste like paper to me (why can’t the body of our Savior be sweet and savory?). However, our host’s position as a Reformed Jew was somewhat advantageous for my enteric nervous system because I did receive one sweet California orange.

“This,” our host said “is particularly important. Years ago a young woman asked a rabbi why women could not lead the prayers during Seder. ‘Because,’ he responded, a women leading the prayers would be as unacceptable and strange as an orange on a Seder plate.’ So,” our host held out the only appetizing looking thing I had seen thus far, “acknowledging women and their progress in spiritual and secular life, we now include an orange on the Seder plate.”

Excellent, I thought, ignoring the greater sociological implications of the orange and taking several slices from a tray. Finally, something that I know will taste good!

In all fairness though the wine was great and the matzo ball soup was pretty nifty. In fact, I almost went back for a third helping of the matzo ball when my friend stopped me.

“Don’t do it. That stuff sticks like concrete in your stomach. You’ll have a bad time later if you eat more.”

I felt a rumble as my stomach went to work making a slurry matzo concrete, and I put down my fork, not wanting to take a matzo crap. I was pretty full anyway, and I settled into conversation with the other people at the table.

Because our host was in law school, many of her guests were also classmates. I had just dropped out of law school and their conversation about memos, statutes, grades, casebooks and exams stuck in my brain as a cold grey lump, as indigestible as matzo ball soup. They were certainly nice, but I really didn’t feel like stepping back into this competitive world in my leisure time, and as they started to turn to the tedious topics of GPA and class standing, it only seemed to confirm my decision, and I gradually tuned them out.

Thankfully, Amber drew me into a conversation with her “gay friend Todd.”

“So do you want to go to the place tonight,” Amber interrupted as I was talking to Todd about nightlife in Los Angeles.

“I don’t know,” Todd said, patting his stomach. “I’m pretty full.”

“Common it’s a new one you would like.”

“I’m a little tired too,” responded Todd, “and I have to do a lot of driving.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, “I don’t know if I want to go to a gay club tonight.”

“No, not a gay club,” said Amber leaning in conspiratorially. “It’s an S & M club,” Amber whispered the sibilant “s” softly across the table, “You know, ‘Sadomasochism.’”

“What?” I said, having almost the same reaction as when I had eaten the horseradish.

“Well, there is this club that is right by LAX. I’ve never been there but my friend Kelly works there.”

“You have a friend that works at an S & M club?” I said a little too loudly, turning the heads of some of the guests who had gone back to watching Moses part the Red Sea on the TV.

“Sort of,” Amber laughed. “It’s actually kind of interesting because she works at a bio-lab doing research during the day, and then some nights she’s has taken up working at the S & M place.”

“For fun?”

“For fun and for money. She’s kinda into that stuff. And she has lots of clients.”

I scratched my head. “When you say ‘clients,’” and here I did lower my voice, “do you mean that she’s some sort of chains and whips bondage prostitute—like a sex slave?” I served myself another helping of matzo ball soup, too entranced in the conversation to pay real attention to what I was eating.

“No, she just sort of lets men spank her a little, nothing serious. She wears these sexy outfits and just lets them tap her a little with a paddle. But there are girls there that bind guys and beat them up a little bit. Some guys get off on that.”

“Amber, I can’t believe that we’re talking about some girl binding men for sexual pleasure at the freakin’ Passover table.”

“Well this is a festival about freedom and liberation,” chimed in her gay friend. “What’s more liberating than having your balls tickled by a French tickler”

I shrugged. He had a point.

“Ok,” I said nibbling on shank bone, “but what will we do? I don’t want to have my hairy butt paddled or whip some random girl. I’m not even dressed for that!”

“Nah,” Amber assured me with a wave of her hand. “You just go in and observe. It’s ‘open house’ today at the S & M club.”

“Open house?” I thought, remembering back to my high school days when an open house meant that I got to display my science projects to parents and talk about what we had been doing in school. I had a feeling that this would be nothing like that.

“Yeah, usually you have to make an appointment with one of the girls or guys or reserve a room with your partner, but if we go today, we can go from room and room and just observe.”

“Observe…” the word slid across the table like a hot slab of butter. “Observe…”

“What, do you think?” I turned to Amber’s gay friend who was starting on this third glass of wine. “Are you going to come to ‘observe’?”

He swallowed the rest of the wine. “Not a chance.”

“Oh come on,” Amber implored, but Todd just got up to watch Moses save his remaining people.

“So I guess it’s just us,” shrugged Amber.

“I haven’t said yes yet.”

“But you will.”

“Maybe. But purely for academic reasons.”

***************************************************


Twenty minutes later we were driving under the roaring jets landing at LAX airport as we pulled into a dark, decrepit side street occupied by warehouses and automotive repair facilities.

“This is it!”

I looked around but didn’t see anything except for a single side door on a warehouse, denoted only by a slender column of light peeping from a doorway and spilling in an elongated rectangle along the asphalt street. No other signs of life were visible.

“Are you sure?” I said skeptically, stepping out onto gravel and feeling the cold, ocean air rife with the greasy scent of jet fuel wash over me.

“Well, I’ve never actually been here before, but this is where my friend told me to go. She should be in there already,” said Amber as she started walking toward the light of the doorway.

“Dude, Amber, this is the kinda situation in a movie where we wake up with our kidneys missing or in some basement for demonic experiments.”

“Whatever,” Amber tossed over her shoulder as she climbed the concrete steps to the door.

Opening the door my eyes were flooded with light. When they finally adjusted I saw a very large tattooed man standing by the door with a long chain hanging from his belt and a worn leather vest.

“ID please,” he commanded in the bored tone of a bouncer.

I quickly yanked my wallet out of my pocket and handed it over. He looked like some grungy Hells Angel and if he’d asked for my left kidney, I probably would have lifted my shirt for the knife.

He checked my ID and nodded us on.

Beyond him a slightly plump, middle-aged woman with long, curly black hair and pale white Goth makeup sat behind a desk. In spite of her “death-becomes-me” appearance, she was surprisingly nice.

“Hello,” she said in a very proper office voice. “Welcome to ‘Passive Arts.’ Since it’s our open house today admission is $20 dollars.”

Ick! Twenty dollars? This seemed kind of steep, but honestly how many times in your life to you go to an S & M club? Research. This was research. I paid the fee and she gave me a “membership card” that said the place’s name along with its credo: “Safe. Sane. Consensual.”

“With that card you are also entitled to come to Passive Arts and purchase time with no membership fee.”

“Well isn’t that sweet?” I thought, taking the card. While Amber paid for her membership I looked around the room. It wasn’t really isn’t anything special. Along the wall was a comfortable tan sofa next to two chairs, while opposite this were several potted ferns. It really looked more like a doctor’s office with an exocentric proprietress than a place for kinky sex.

Still, we hadn’t gone inside yet. Amber received her card and the strange tattooed guard gave us another nod, opening a door behind the front desk to the darkness beyond. Once again, I was blinded, but this time by darkness, as my eyes adjusted to the dimly lit room around me.

As shapes fade into view, I notice that the right wall is occupied by a large bar with about twelve seats. A thin bartender with a very tight black corset walks back and forth flirting with customers and serving them drinks. Just past the bar are four entrances leading to rooms unknown. To our left is a lounge area with four or five couches and several small round tables. At the end of the room is a raised wooden stage, beyond which is a huge projection screen with a movie playing. A subtitle along the side reads “Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS.” I am mesmerized for a full five minutes while on the screen a buxom woman in a Nazi uniform tortures naked Jewish women with equally large breasts before returning to her quarters to rape and ruthlessly fuck imprisoned American male soldiers.

“Wow,” I tell Amber. “This is a great way to celebrate Passover!” I clap.

“Well, I didn’t know, but apparently this is “Nazi and Allied Forces Night” at Deviant Arts.”

“Oh, boy,” I say as we walk over to the bar.

We order a drink and sit down on one of the black leather couches in the lounge area. As my eyes adjust to the light, I notice that Amber is indeed right. A middle aged man in a close clipped white beard, a small grey cap and army uniform, long black boots, and a large arm band with the red border, white circle, and Nazi swastika sits across from us at another table, giving a small smile and a wink.

Oh my.

“Wow,” I tell Amber, “I don’t know if I feel comfortable here…”

“Relax,” she smiles. “We have the Allied Forces on our side.”

And we did.

Women in white sailor hats, extremely short white shirts, and tight white uniforms exposing their large breasts walk lazily around the room. I also notice several women wearing all blue or green variants on this theme. Although they may have low cut tops, and short skirts, their shiny brass buttons tell us that they are certainly part of the military.

“Canadian, and Australian Forces over there,” Amber tells me and I nod. Turning to the large screen again as “Ilsa the She Wolf” fist fucks one of her female prisoners as she screams in pain.

“Wow. I just had no idea that that could go into there. I think I need another drunk,” I get up.

Amber smiles, “Isn’t this fun.”

“I definitely need another drink.”

I order a rum and coke at the bar. The place is still pretty empty, but I do notice that there are other “themed” individuals arriving that have absolutely nothing to do with Nazi’s or Allied Forces (as far as I know, but Ilsa the She Wolf may disagree).

Next to me at the bar a very fat, bald man is enjoying what looks like a Red Bull and Vodka, wearing only two leather straps that crisscross his body, ending at his groin. From his point on he is supported by some sort of leather thong extending to the front in a much-too-small codpiece that allows a portion of his testicles to protrude like an inguinal hernia. He adjusts his thick glasses and scratches his hairy man-boob, and I hope that my drink arrives sooner rather than later.

Trying to distract myself, I scan the rest of the people at the bar noticing several females that are in tight competition with this gentleman for lack of clothing. Many of them have short leather skirts and completely exposed tops. In fact, when I look closer I realize that the majority of them have absolutely nothing on the upper half of their body aside from simple black “X’s” of electrical tape across their areolas. When viewed as a whole, this minor concession seems absurd, like the covers of porn magazines that have little shining stars on the nipples of the girls on the cover, as if this was some sacred unknowable part of the human anatomy.

Several very attractive girls walk by and smile at me. I smile back. I begin to feel a little bit better about the place—until I realize that most of these girls must be hired by the place to make everyone feel hospitable.

I get my drink and the fat man in the leather straps also smiles at me. It’s the same smile that the girls had given me. Strangely enough, this does not make me feel more at home at all.

Quickly walking back to the table I notice that there is a tall Asian girl with long black hair and a short black skirt talking to Amber. Although by normal club standards, she’s not wearing much, I’m still glad that there is at least one person here (beside Amber) with more clothes on her upper half than pasties. Especially since I have on a collared, long-sleeved black shirt and jeans which seem to be the S & M club equivalent of wearing an overcoat and a tousle cap to the beach.

The girl turns when I walk up and greets me with a brilliant smile.

“Hi! You must be Mark,” I’m Kelly. The effusiveness of her greeting throws me off for a second, and I eyed her suspiciously, as if she’s a stripper trying to collect lap dances.

Catching my look, Amber puts her hand on my shoulder to set me at ease.

“Remember, this is my friend I told you we were meeting?”

“Oh yeah…” I say, a little embarrassed. “So… you work here?”

“Yeah, but I am off shift now. I was wearing something a little more daring than this earlier,” she pointes to her black dress that really looks more like a slip. “But I do have cute pink panties on.”

“Oh. Uh. Ok.” I redden. “That’s nice…”

There is an awkward pause while I fish through my mind for something to say.

“So how does this, you know work?” I ask.

The more I look around the more I notice that nearly all of the Nazis in the room are middle aged males, while a good portion of the females are twenty-somethings dressed as Allied Forces.

“Ah, well this is not how it usually looks or works around here. I’m sure they already told you this is one of our open houses. To get people interested. Show them what we do. Usually, during the week, it’s single guys or couples that come in. Very rarely single women. So the first thing a guy does when he comes in is tell us if he is a 'dom' or a 'sub.'”

“A dom or a sub?” I ask, distracted by a tall man wearing only a top hat and a leather Speedo is sitting down on at a couch. A young, twenty-something black girl with purple dreadlocks and a string bikini brings him a drink and nuzzles up next to him.

“Yeah, that’s a “dominant” or “submissive” partner in S & M.”

“Ah,” I look her up and down quickly trying to gauge which one she would be. She seems athletic.

“So you’re the dom?” I guess.

“Nope. I don’t have enough training. “I tried once, but I tended to hurt the guy.”

“But isn’t that the point?” I ask. On screen Ilsa is grabbing an American POW’s dick and twisting it into contortions that I was sure weren’t going to lead to a happy ending.

“No. Not at all. S & M is all about trust. That’s a big part of the turn-on for the both the dom and the sub. The sub trusts that the dom won’t really hurt them beyond what they want, and the dom is turned on by the trust that is placed with them. Besides the sub is always in control.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely.” They’re the ones that determine the boundaries—how far things can go. You seem pretty new to this. Maybe it’s really better for you to see…”

“See?” I swallow hard.

“Of course,” she points to the doors at the end of the room. This is our open house. The time when newbies like you guys can see what really goes on here, but in a calm, comfortable atmosphere. We have professional doms and subs in most of the rooms, but we also allow couples that are regulars perform in the rooms today as well.”

“Like have sex?”

“No. Just whips and paddles. There is no release allowed here. At least not during the open house.”

“Common, I’ll show you,” she gets up and motions us to a room just to the right of the stage. It is a large warehouse area with another bar. Inside is an Asian woman wearing an army Camo outfit with exceedingly short shorts and a buttoned top that strained against the apparent pressure of her large breasts. She wears a general’s cap and glowers at everyone around the room. Her outfit doesn’t appear to be from either the Allied Forces or Nazi camps, but since it’s apparent that she’s the one in charge, no one is about to call her on the historical accuracy of her clothing.

There is a Nazi Officer in the center of the room facing her. She walks across the room and begins brutally ripping his clothes off-- but with just enough care to make sure that she didn’t pop any off the buttons his uniform.

“Pussy!”

“Coward!” she screams, batting him about the head.

“You fucking spineless, dickless, cunt of a man!”

He whimpers and cries.

Finally, when he has been reduced to just a set of leather bikini briefs, she bounds his hands to a winch hanging above him. I look upward and notice that we are in a very high room like a warehouse storage facility with ceilings that extended beyond two stories.

“Is she going to wench him up there?” I ask Kelly with a little too much concern.

“Maybe,” she shrugs indifferently.

The Asian woman shouts again at the man.

“You stupid piece of fucking shit! Your body is repulsive!”

More men and women gather around in a circle to watch the spectacle. I look around and notice that there are now many people dressed in normal street clothes. People like me here to check out the “open house.” In fact, there seems to be many more people in normal clothes here than in the main room. This makes sense though. After all, the real S & M aficionados probably find this sort of exhibition a bore, preferring more experimental “hands-on” activities during the week.

“Fuck you!” the small Asian dom screams so close to the man’s face that spit flies from her mouth onto his nose. “Your cock is small, and now everyone here can watch you and see it!”

I grimace, hoping that she will not take off the codpiece to prove her point.

“Common, let’s check out the other rooms,” Kelly pulled at my arm.

I nod and look one last time as the busty Asian woman slaps the guy’s backside with a paddle taken from a belt around her waist.

“THWACK!”

She smiles in malicious satisfaction and smacks his ass again, this time with her hand, looking back at the audience.

A performance, sure, but there's something more to it. More compelling. Or repulsive. What it is I can’t quite put my finger on, but I have to admit there is something fucking hot about this. It’s not imagining being the guy being beaten, or the one inflicting punishment. It’s something else…Something of the voyeur in me is coming out. I look back at the crowd of men and woman behind me, a vast majority now dressed in street clothes, smiling and talking to each other as if they were watching a ball game.

The busty Asian woman stops her beatings and berating to bring out a cloth. She wraps it around the humiliated man’s hands and ties it in a loop. Hearing a metallic sliding sound I look up and see a chain unraveling from the ceiling-- clunk, clunk, clunking as the pulley lets down a long metal chain. A large rusty metal hook is attached to the chain, making its way to the floor like the head of a lazy python.

“Common,” Kelly pulls at my arm again.

“But, wait,” I whine, “Is she going to string him up on the ceiling or something?”

“Probably,” Kelly responds with a bored flat tone.

“But there are performances in other rooms… Common.”

Performances? Like a three-ring circus?

She pulls Amber and me down the hall to another room. Unlike the room we had left, this one only has a lower, one-story ceiling and only three couples inside—one Nazi and Allied Forces pair, and a standard dom-sub leather pair. A third couple stands next to the rear wall, which is a floor-to-ceiling mirror. The girl is pasty white, medium height, with a small pink shirt stretched across her full round breasts so that the cloth contours and tucks inward under them, folding into a darkened recess under each round, full globe. She wears a black bikini leather bottom and her face is absolutely stunning, with small red lips, lightly rouged cheeks, and deep heavy eyes. With hair cut short and dyed a bright red, she looks like a cross between a powdered 1930’s starlet and a Queen of the Dead.

Behind her unwinding a whip is a man in his late forties. He is tall and slightly muscular with a pate of slightly balding hair pulled back into a small samurai ponytail. Two straps of leather cross his chest, coming together at a circular clasp in the center. A leather tunic wraps his lower half, with the skirt portion flapping slightly as he walks. Despite the fact the girl must be in her mid-twenties, she looks very young next to him, like a father and daughter pair. I am starting to notice that this seems to be a trend throughout the club.

The man walks to the middle of the wall and stands spay legged, motioning the girl forward. She nods submissively and he pushes her down on her hands and knees in front of his leather kilt. I glance over at Amber, who gives a look that seems to say “hey, why not?” I give a look back that says “I didn’t like where this is going.”

But it didn’t go where I think it will.

He grabs the girl’s hair and pulls her to her feet, moving her close to his face. She lets out a sigh. Of pain? Enjoyment? He pulls her roughly again and places his grisly face close to hers. He pulls her hair back and examines her neck, while she keeps her mouth open in a silent moan. As violent as the scene seems, there is a sort of primal tenderness to it, like a wolf shepherding his cub. Then, as if he had grown bored of her, he pushed her forward on all fours again facing the audience. He stands behind her pulling her hair as she arches her back. He takes a coiled whip from a belt around his waist and places the handle across her neck, pressing into her white flesh slightly.

She chokes.

He releases her.

She falls.

I look to the audience. Some of us are smiling; some of us are staring with open mouths; some of us are waiting to see what happens next. But that is a part of it. We are all complicit. This is the show. “But what must it be like to have this show all to one’s self?” I think absently mindedly. Then I realize that I would neither like to be the one inflicting the pain or enduring it. Like so many other things, I do not want a part in this human drama, and prefer to be on the outskirts, a spectator—a voyeur. This is my only proper role, and the only role that I will be playing for the rest of the evening.

The man uncoils the whip, letting her look at it hanging close to his crotch, as phallic as she wants it. He backs up and uncoils it, standing several feet away. She is on her knees now, staring vacantly forward—seeing nothing. A sudden crack of the whip from behind her and I jump, making a move to clutch at Amber, then straightening into a more “manly” posture. He does it again, cracking the whip in front of her face. She doesn’t react. She is a good servant.

Lifting her up by her hair, he pushes her roughly down on her butt so that she is kneeling facing the audience.

“Take it off,” he says with an all-commanding air.

Her face remains motionless and expressionless, but her arms move in obedience, reaching behind her as she pulls her t-shirt off. Her breasts are lifted up by the material then bounce down again, smooth, full and pliable, revealing small pink nipples on a rounded expanse. Once again, I am taken aback by how beautiful this girl is, and looking over shoulders at her grizzled counterpart, who stalks the room like a proud wolf, I strained to see the attraction to her older mate. I want to leave my post and get up and save her, but I know that she is already saved, that what I am seeing is her “salvation.”

He walks behind her, taking several steps back, uncoiling his whip to its full length. I looked over at Amber and Kelly with a pained expression, but they don’t return my gaze because they are too engrossed in the scene.

Smooth sloping neck, perfect full breasts, tight firm stomach--it seems like such a sin to violate or despoil the creature in front of him. The man raises the whip, holding it high in the air. The girl is expressionless serine. His arm moves.

I cringe.

The whip cracks and I close my eyes.

When I open them the girl is sitting in the same place, with the same mask for a face. Nothing appears to have changed.

Had he even touched her at all? I look to the mirror behind her and see no mark along her back.

He pulls the whip upward again and I hear a crack, but this time I keep my eyes open and watch. Just the tip of his whip touches her back, with a soft smacking sound like a parent paddling a disobedient child. I push through the crowd to the edge of the room so that I can get a better view. Her back is pink with small welts, but otherwise nothing mars it. No blood has been drawn.

Time and time again, the man draws back the whip and I hear the crack, and time and time again, small pink welts appear on her back, but no blood. I watch and begin to understand how this is a game of trust, and not a simple game of violence and power that it is reduced to in the mainstream media.

I am also starting to understand why they don’t let amateurs engage each other with whips on open house night. This is not only a game of trust, but skill. The dom must not only be able to inflict pain, but to do this within the limits that the sub has set. I look around at some of the muscle-bound frat-types that have now gathered in the room, and consider how they would surely tear this girl to shreds with the whip. Perhaps that is why so many of these female-sub male-dom pairs have older gentlemen as the doms. It’s just a question of maturity. Yet, looking around the room at several young female-doms with high heels and whips leading older men-subs by dog-collars, I am unable to explain the reverse phenomenon.

Maybe the men don’t care how badly they are hurt as long as it is by the most attractive female they can find. It wouldn’t be the first time.

“There’s more,” Kelly motions us and we leave the room as the whip cracks in front of the girl’s face. We walk down the corridor and I pass an Allied Forces girl with a plunging neckline, and I smile and give a nod in greeting. She ignores me and walks past me to talk to a large man dressed in a Nazi uniform. Maybe things aren’t so different from normal clubs after all, I sigh.

We enter another room and I notice that it is identical to the one which we have just left. Like the other, the floor is made of hardwood, but has mats spread across it, and the far wall facing the entrance is a mirror. With the exception of what appears to be two long, padded doctor’s examining benches, it looks like this could be a dance studio. Maybe it still is. It’s LA after all, and such a thing wouldn’t be unheard of.

“Are you on for yoga at Passive Arts?”

“Wouldn’t miss it! Don’t forget to bring your mats and paddles!”

When we first arrive in the room, the benches are empty with a Latin man in sagging jeans and a baggie shirt inspecting one of the doctor’s benches and moving around it with a puzzled expression, as if he is trying to solve a Rubix Cube with his eyes alone. Off in a corner, his female companion, dressed in a black top and small black skirt, more suggestive of clubbing than S & M, rolls her eyes. I imagine their back story.

“Hey, honey, I know I’ve been promising to take you to a club and it’s been a long time since we’ve been out, but want to go tonight to this new place I’ve been hearing about?”

“Oh baby, of course!”

“Great, it’s right by the airport, just wear whatever you would normally to a club.”

Poor girl.

As the man continues to look curiously at the doctor’s chair, some of the regulars enter the room and get started on the other one. On the wall hang several paddles with holes drilled into them. A girl with blue mascara streaked in blots across the sides of her face like a character in blade runner or the caricature of a drugged out Native American with access to David Bowie’s Make-up cabinet, walks over to the paddles and picks one out. Her hair is pink and pulled into to perky pigtails sticking upward from the top of her head. It’s the hair cut of a schoolgirl but she looks anything but childish. Thick red lipstick covers her lips like blood puckered into a snarl. Her white top and pants are made of a shiny synthetic material that looks like rubber and hugs close to her body. Long black boots come to the level of her knee, and when she walks she stomps the ground as if it is alive and she is determined to kill it.

She pulls along a chubby fat man that looks like a clone of all the other chubby fat men with collars I have seen that night. Perhaps all chubby, fat men secretly yearn to wear leather underwear and dog collars and be dominated in such a fashion. They just need to meet the right woman (or be willing to pay 10 dollars a minute to have the crap beaten out of them at Passive Arts!). She tugs at the collar again and pulls him onto the bed. Once on it, the fat man lies obediently face down. With the fat man in this position, the table reminds me of the massage beds at the mall. To his side are arm restraints, which the dom (who begins to look eerily like the sadistic Nurse Ratched) uses to fasten his arms down. Then she walks behind him, raises the paddle, and with a predictably gelatinous smack, lands a solid blow on the man’s rear.

I watch the recoil of the fat along his body, with thinly veiled disgust. The nurse nods across the room to the Latin man with the baggie pants as if to say “this is how it’s done.” In turn, he looks to his girlfriend and motions her over. To my surprise, she walks to him and soon they are happily selecting paddles, like a couple at a used car lot, and in several more minutes, his attractive girlfriend is happily receiving blows to her rear.

Who would have thought?

When both couples are done they take a spray bottle from the wall and spray down the benches, wiping them clean with paper towels, just like equipment at a gym. Once again the rituals and motions seem both oddly familiar and out of place to me. Perhaps in a strange way, the S & M world is just a costume ball masking the fact that at its core everything is the same, and nothing is new.

We leave the room, and I look at the screen showing the film in the main area. On it Ilsa the She Wolf is forcing some naked Jewish girl to eat her cunt while a line of bare breasted women wait in terrified horror for their turn. Mesmerized once again by this stunning piece of cinema, I fail to notice a surreal spectacle taking place just below the level of the screen. There on the wooden stage in front of the projection are two real-life women jumping and gyrating to a mystical beat that only they can hear. One is a girl dressed in an Allied Forces uniform, with a smartly cocked (no pun intended) hat, a low cut kaki top, and skin-tight shorts. Alongside her, is a happy, smiling Nazi girl, similarly dressed, but in grey, with a swastika on her arm, and high leather boots. They shake and shimmy, doing a go-go dance together. The Nazi pauses occasionally to do a little goosestep, which the Allied Forces girl indulge with a clap to keep the non-existent beat, before they continue their dance by shaking their breasts against each other.

A crowd is gathering and I don’t know whether to be horrified or turned on, so instead I stand transfixed, my cock as unresolved as my mind, dangling in half limp solidarity with the dancers. I’m a bit dazed and confused and when Kelly and Amber begin looking through a mélange of chains, whips, corsets, and giant, bulging dildos set up “boutique-style” for purchase along a table next to the bar. Excusing myself, I walk in a haze down one of the side hallways.

The first room that I come to is small and cramped with a chalk board along the wall perpendicular to four children’s-sized chairs and desks. In the center of the room, in front of the desks, is a waist-high table. I don’t understand its purpose, and I walk around it, analyzing it academically. It’s certainly too small for a person, being only a foot or two in length, so it can’t be one of the “doctor’s beds” I had seen in the other room. Still, there are two leather restraints along the sides. Perhaps it’s for a child? No that’s too sick. Maybe a midget? Possibly. Hmm…No. Even in a city as perverted and depraved as Los Angeles, there really can’t be that many S & M midgets.

But what then…

Just as I am pondering this, a small brunette dressed in a Catholic school girl’s outfit enters the room. Following behind this barely legal fantasy is a pudgy balding middle aged man, led along by the tips of his fingers. Yet “led” is a rather strong word in this instance, merely denoting his relative position to her, because he nearly outstrips the girl with his walk, eagerly bounding into the room like a puppy chasing his favorite ball. She looks backward over her shoulder flicking her hair, then bending over the table with her ass facing backward toward me and her gentleman escort.

“I’m ready,” she coos as the gentleman advances, strapping her arms along the side of the table. Suddenly I have the feeling that I am in the middle of a vivid, very real porn movie. Supporting this thought, a strange little Indian man peeps around the corner and asks if anything is going on, before giving a little gasp of delight, and joining me at my side with an expectant nudge. Good God, I think, we are those strange men that appear at the window while the plumber is fucking the housewife. Only this time, according to the theme of the room, we are students watching our teacher exact a disciplinary measure on one of his “bad pupils.” The “teacher” wiggles and shimmies himself up behind her, and I half-expect the man to pull down his pants, rip off her pink panties (I can see them) and have a go at it right then and there. Instead, I see him step back and transfer something from his right to his left hand. I barely have time to register that it is a foot-long rubber paddle with holes drilled into it before the swift smack echoes in the room.

SMACK!

Class is definitely in session.

“Oh, give it to me! Give it to me!” she begs.

“Yeah, I’ll give it to you,” he responds.

I have to stifle a laugh. This is perfectly ludicrous, this balding middle aged-accountant-schoolteacher-businessman- whatever beating this little vixen’s booty a rosy red while she moans orgasmically in-between hits. And really, couldn’t they think up better dialogue? This is soooo 1980’s porn. Common guys. Step it up.

“Oh it hurts. It hurts.”

“Oh yeah, it hurts.”



A laugh is welling up in my throat again and I turn away to suppress any further visions of ludicrocity. The Indian man next to me seems to be grooving to the beat of the whacks, moving his head forward and backward to the sound of each smack.

He’s getting off on this, I think. Really getting off on this. I try not to look, but have to—I have to—and my eyes are drawn downward as I detect a barely perceptible bulge developing in his pants.

This is my queue to leave.

Right now.

I do an about-face and march out the door, walking farther down the hallway. The first room that I come to is barren except for a single lamp and I breathe of relief. I want to sit down and rest—my mind, my thoughts, my body—but unfortunately there is no chair, nothing for me to sit on. I start to sit on the floor, but I see discolored spots here and there that are white, brown, and red—the kind of colors that you don’t want to see on the floor of an S & M place. Instead I go across the hall to the next room.

Inside there is a similar setup, a light in one corner, a light in the next corner, negative space in-between. Except that it isn’t negative space. Between the lights is a man in makeup, with a girl next to him, a blur of black leather bound couples moving and mending in the flash of my iris as I turn away and walk to the end of the hallway.

One, two, three, four, five, six steps I walk and turn. Stunned, dazed goose-stepping in synch to verve of the club. I close my eyes. Seven, eight nine, ten, turn.

I am inside the room. I open my eyes. And there they are. And why fucking not? Why shouldn’t they be there? Standing in front of me is a very fat old man with leather underwear. But not just “regular” leather underwear (if that exists), or even just Speedo-style leather underwear. This is the real deal, with a completely separate leather cradle for each individual testicle, extending in a hammock-like strap to the superstructure of the leather girding his loins. I look into his wrinkled bald face and he gives me a little wink. He is wearing glasses. And once again, why the fuck not? He needs those glasses to see his ever-lovely wife that is standing there right next to him, her sagging paps held in pace by her own precious leather hammocks complemented, of course, by a bikini leather bottom.

They stand there and look at me, paternal smiles on each of their faces, American Gothic turned askew.

“Well come in. Come in.”

I spend the commodity of my eleventh, twelfth, and even my thirteenth step tracing a linear path toward them.

“Why are you here?” I want to ask them. “Why do you still want to have sex when you are only one or two photon shifts away from an energy-level that will render you as protoplasmic jelly? Do you still even turn each other on? Do you imagine young celebrities naked when you attempt to fuck or to you fall back on old favorites like Grace Kelley and Errol Flynn?”

All of this spins through my head, but I say nothing, and as they beckon me forward with their withered hands, I walk obediently to these hoary, sagging sirens, onward to whatever sexual deviance they will show me.

“Hello,” the gentleman extends his hand.

“Hello,” I tell the man shaking the withered stump that he extends to me, careful not to violate its dependence on a tinsel strength of near zero.

“Welcome to the dungeon.”

“Dungeon?” I think, and look around me. The walls are molded in plaster of Paris grey bricks with the iron bars of a prison cell partitioning off a third of the room. Inside the cell is a black leather bed precisely the size of a single person. Once again I don’t understand the purpose of the bed and the bars, but my adopted surrogate S & M grandmother and grandfather are more than happy to give me a demonstration. I watch as the elderly man waddles across the room like a penguin and sits down on the edge of the bed. The old woman walks forward with some small metal object, which she takes and then begins to attach to the end of the bed. Although it’s diminutive, I can tell that it is a vice.

“What’s that for?” I ask, as she screws it into the bed.

She doesn’t answer, but gives me a yellow toothed grin.

“Don’t worry. This is an open house, and they don’t allow release.”

“Release?” I think.

“Ohhhhhhhh, ‘release,’”

Jesus fucking Christ.

I look up at the old man, which for some reason, seems to be intuiting my thoughts and smiles benignly back.

There is a click and the vice snaps into place. The old man scoots up to the edge of the bed. The old woman moves to the end of the bed.

I retract my eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth step and then follow the regressive path down the hall, past the room of blurred leather, past the now-full empty room, past the school room with the funny Indian man, and back into the main room.

“So did you find anything interesting back there?” asks my friend Amber.

I scratch my head silently.

“I don’t know.”

“Really? What’d you see?” she asks.

“What do you have over here?” I point to something in her hands, changing the subject.

“Oh what do you think of this?” she smiles and holds something up.

It’s a simple black piece of cloth that looks like some sort of negligee.

“What is it?”

“It’s a corset,” interrupts Kelly, showing off a pink one and holding it up to her chest.

“Oh…” I say, “Like for pushing up boobs, or making them seem bigger?” I look down at Kelly’s B-cups with an unintentionally meaningful glance.

“What do you think of mine,” Amber counter-interrupts

“Yours…?”

“The corset!”

“Oh…uh…good?” I respond uncertainly, looking toward the screen at the end of the room as a flash of gunfire splatters hot Jew-girl brains and Helga the She Wolf is covered in blood.

“Good,” says Amber with a satisfied smile, “I’m probably going to buy one, but it may be a while. They’re kind of pricey. But they’re ‘fitted’ so it’s worth it.”

“Oh,” I say, women’s undergarments being an even greater mystery to me than the sum of the women they contain.

As a side note, Amber did, in fact, purchase one of the corsets. A beautiful black number to tune of four hundred dollars. That’s right. Four hundred dollars. That’s probably more money than my whole closet of clothes. I didn’t know that they even had lingerie that cost that much. But they do. And Amber owns it. I think that years later she still regrets it. She’ll probably rent it to you if you really need something to give your boobs that extra Gothic, eggs over-easy look. Or, if you’re a modern woman living in an era beyond the eighteenth century you can just buy a water bra.

I watch Kelly and Amber return to the corsets with an excitement that I’ve only seen matched by mother and sister at Macy’s. The noise, the sounds, the corsets, the dildos lying on the table, are all too much for me and I push past an SS Soldier and some girl in a Sailor outfit and order two shots at the bar.

“Of what,” the female bartender asks me with a cruel smile.

“Hmmmm….”

“Rum…?” I say.

“That was a question,” responds the bartender, “I asked for an answer.”

“Oh,” I say more assertively to the bartender that looks like she missed the memo on Allied Forces and Nazi night and is instead dressed like some advertisement for the corsets that Amber is looking at with dash of Gothic “Interview with a Vampire” thrown in. “Could I have two shots of rum?”

“A question again?”

Ugh.

“Ok, GIVE me two shots of rum.”

“Right-o,” she smiles wryly and splashes alcohol into the shot glasses next to my hands, which cools my knuckles before evaporating on the bar.

I throw the shots back, doing a little hop-shuffle in-between as I gag from the burning taste in my throat. I still have a lot in my stomach after the Seder and the shots aren’t taking effect right away so I order a rum and coke and head off toward the lounge area on the left-hand side of the room.

I stir the ice cubes with my finger and raise the glass to my eye level, looking at the candle light on a table next to me in the flickering convolutions. A warm tingle is spreading through my body, and I can tell that the alcohol is starting to take effect. I look around and see that an attractive young girl with long black hair and a low cut black leather outfit is sitting on a couch across from my table. She twists her hair lazily, looking in no particular direction, with a bored stare that seems to trace a miasmic fog around her body like some invisible don’t-touch-me force field.

A man in an American Officer uniform approaches, eyeing her for a second as he awkwardly repositions his drink in his hand. He is short, skinny, squints slightly (the effect of leaving his glasses at home?), and slouches as he walks.

“Hi,” he says to her.

“Hi,” she turns her head a quarter, does a quick flip-scan with her eyes, decides that it is not worth following through with a full head turn, and turns back to staring into some more meaningful event-horizon on the dating scene.

Not taking he hint, the American Officer sits down on the couch a bit too closely to the girl. The leather of the couch gives an exhausted squeak and she scoots farther away.

“So, I was just wondering how you like things so far,” he takes off his small hat and polishes its leather brim against his cotton uniform.

“Great…” she says.

There is an awkward pause.

The girl turns her head farther away from the American Officer, as if she has seen something.

“Hey Sasha!” she shouts, and crosses the room quickly to another girl.

Left alone in the backwash of failure, I watch as the man takes a long gulp of his drink, obviously reddening even under the dark lights of the club. He looks around to see if anyone has seen this foolish display, and almost breathes a sigh of relief before noticing me looking directly at him. Because I am getting more and more buzzed, I don’t find it particularly awkward to be staring directly into the face of a stranger.

“So how do you like this club,” he asks, embarrassed.

“It’s ‘great,’” I respond, “really ‘great.’”

He pales and moves away to some other corner of the club.

I watch several other men flirt with other women with various degrees of success and failure. After a while I get begin to understand that although this is an S & M club, everything is perfectly and predictably exactly like a regular club. Men buy women drinks to talk to them. Attractive couples congregate together like globs of oil on water. Less attractive individuals hang out toward the margins or end up on the chairs watching Ilsa the Wonder Bitch kill an increasingly motley crew of hot Jewish prisoners.

I wander back up the hall to the first room that I had visited. By now the man that the hot Asian army woman had been tying up has been hog-tied, gagged and winched twelve feet off the ground with a small crowd gathered along the sides of the room.

“You fucking piece of shit! You like that? You like that?” the Asian army woman below shouts up at him.

He nods and she winches it down lower, lower-- to eye level so that she can scream in his face.

“Fuck you! Fuck you, you pussy!” she takes a paddle and hits his ass. He squeals and writhes. Then she turns the crank of a winch and he ascends toward the ceiling once again for the pantomime to repeat itself.

At first I scrunch my face up in disgust, but after watching this happen two, three, four times things just become monotonous. Down to the next room. A naked girl. Whipping. A naked girl. Whipping. Next room. Spanking. Another girl. Spanking. Next room. The classroom. Spanking. Spanking. Spanking. Next room. Groups gather and talk. Something different. Something boring. Nothing sexual. Nothing scandalous. Business. Current events. Politics. Next room. A couple make out drunkenly against a wall. Down the hall. The dungeon. I stop and turn. I don’t bother.

I repeat this several times.

I repeat this several times.

I repeat this several times.

Although I never thought I would be saying this, I am actually getting bored at an S & M club. I order a Red Bull and vodka, hoping that the caffeine will perk up my dragging attention and sit at the bar. On the screen Ilsa/Helga the She Wolf/Fox-Whatever is repeating for the third? The fourth? The fifth time? I feel like I can almost recite the words and the plot at this point. Here Ilsa takes command. Here Ilsa forces her subordinate to fuck her before flogging him within inches of his life. Here Ilsa rounds up the virgins. Here Helga forces one virgin to kill another then fucks another on their bloody corpse.

Booorrriing.

Everything. This whole club seems to remind me strikingly. Sadly. Monotonously. Pitifully-- how boringly binary life is.

In out. In out. Out in. In out. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Pain. Pleasure. Happiness. Sadness. Dark. Light. Life/death. All of it—merged and squished together.

All of it really ones or zeros, black and white.

Binary.

But really, sadly, and once again pathetically, we somehow manage most of the time to be somewhere in-between. I am here not as a participant inflicting or being inflicted on, but a voyeur settling into some shady glen between peaks. But even these “peaks” don’t seem to be much. Just some lame jack-off to a shadowy stereotype of what sex could be or should be, denying its sad final truth that the action exists just to recreate itself in others.

We fuck and fuck with the biological imperative instilled in us by some prime mover- some great god that had no precursor- so that the very act of our creation can only be though of as the most divine and holy masturbation of the great He into the eternal black void to which the less-than-great we can hope to return. Fuck, fuck fucking. We fuck and create more fuckers to fuck and fuck out to the end of time. One great eternal line of bent over cock sucking, cum dripping, tits and ass.

But maybe all of this S & M serves to turn it away- subvert it and make it something beyond procreation, something closer to that great cosmic jack off.

Ugh. I finish my Red Bull and vodka and feel my bladder demanding a visit to the bathroom. While I am pissing I look at the walls. There are back and white pictures. One shows a black a dildo between two large, white perfect breasts.

“Not bad,” I think.

Another shows the smooth curve of an ass. Still another shows a single eye surrounded by the leather mask. Not bad again. Probably some of the better things about this place. Maybe the best art here. In the toilet while I piss.

I wash my hands and walk back into the main room and look for Amber and Kelly. They aren’t at the boutique table with the corsets, and I find them alone in the “school room,” sitting at one of the miniature desks. I slump down at a seat behind them.

“You doing ok?” asks Amber, “you look tired.”

“Yeah, I am ok,” I respond.

“Ok.”

“So yeah,” Kelly continues with some conversation that must have been underway before I came in “he’s really hot. But he’s a janitor. I mean, common. It’s a little pathetic.”

“What are you talking about?” I ask.

“This guy that I was dating.”

“She met him at a ‘swingers party.’”

“A swinger’s party?” I ask, a bit soddenly.

“Yeah…a swingers party,” Kelly says with a bored expression that I realize is a carbon copy of the one I had seen on the girl on the couch earlier with the failed attempt from the young gentleman.

For those that are even more ignorant about sex and sexuality than me, a “Swinger’s Party,” as I understand it, is usually an event in which partners come, exchange mates, have sex, leave/and or have more sex.

“So you were there with a boyfriend? And you swapped with someone else’s boyfriend?”

“No,” says Kelly lazily. “You just come to the party, with or without anyone, and if you find someone there that you like, you have sex with them.” She shrugs nonchalantly.

“Really?”

“Yeah. They basically have these parties at hotels and people come to them and they have bowls of condoms. Then if you see somebody you like you get a condom, go into a room, and well, fuck.”

“Fuck?” I raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah.”

“And that’s where you met the guy you were talking about?”

“Yeah. I was sitting on this couch with my friend, and I had been there for an hour or so and I was telling my friend that there was no one that I wanted there. Then I saw him come in and I was like ‘wow.’ So I watched and was thinking of saying something to him but he came up to me and then we went and fucked,” she laughs.

I still don’t understand the basic mechanics of these parties, so I have to ask.

“Wait, so you went—just you and this guy-- into one of the backrooms and had sex?”

“Oh no,” she says. “There are several rooms with beds, so if you want to fuck, you can just do it. Of course there are other people in there. When you’re fucking other people just stand on the edges of the bed and watch. God, that night we must have fucked everywhere. On the bed. In the bathroom. Just in the hall. We fucked so many times that night.”

“In front of a bunch of people watching?” more surprised by this than anything I have seen that night.

“Sure,” she shrugs.

“Isn’t that hard to do? In front of people?”

“No. Why would it be?”

“Sure,” I respond. “Why not?”

Kelly seems to be talking to herself, more than me, off of some rehearsed script that she’s recited many times. She’s seems to be one of those people that likes to say and/or do the most outrageous things they can completely dead-pan, so that they can get the maximum rise from more conservative people. I already don’t like her that much, and don’t want to indulge her, but I am curious about what she has to say.

“But aren’t you a little worried about, like, STD’s and stuff?”

“Oh, they have condoms. And besides they have plastic on the floor.”

“Plastic…ok…”

“But yeah,” she turns back to Amber, signaling that our conversation is basically over. “I like this other guy but he’s not as good looking. Actually not that good looking at all, but he is going to get this place in this firm soon. As soon as he gets that he will be ‘ballin.’ But it’s tough, you know? This other guy is pretty hot…” she smiles looking to Amber for conformation.

“Yeah,” Amber turns to me, “I’ve seen this janitor guy and he is actually really hot.” Amber turns back to Kelly, “But you’ve been with a bunch of guys that are really hot.”

Amber later confirms that in general Kelly is quite popular with men and is a hot commodity at the S & M club. I look Kelly over. She was “ok” attractive. Nothing stellar or anything that would turn your head if she were wearing clothes on the street. And she’s conceited. Just the way she talks about guys being so into her in such an offhanded way is a major turn off for me, but I guess a decent number of guys actually go for that. Even though I’m making her sound bad, the fact that she is popular in the club is actually no mystery. She’s Asian, pretty tall at around 5’10 or so, and not un-attractive. So she’s basically a normal looking Asian girl. And other than her and the girl that had been shouting insults at the hog-tied guy in the first room, she has zero competition for guys with an Asian fetish. In fact, I barely saw any minorities at all in the club, so that if you’re a female with a skin tone that can take a decent tan, you’d probably arouse attention as an interesting commodity.

“Yeah, so I don’t know about that janitor guy,” Kelly continues.

“But the other guy is reallllllly hot,” laughs Amber.

“Yeah, but he’s also really dumb. Like I said, jaaaanitoooor. I can’t take a person like that to meet my parents. And that is really important to me. He’s lame and has no ambition and just wants to be a janitor. I think I’ll dump him soon. I mean why should I compromise?” she looks at both me and Amber, and I try to hide my mounting disgust.

“Right?” she looks at me.

“Of course,” I respond seriously.

“So I don’t know. Like I said I will have to see if this guy get’s his firm gig…”

“Ugh,” I think. At least prostitutes have an honest profession.

Kelly continues to talk about the multitude of men that are interested in her, her regular day job as a lab technician doing research, her strategies for finding a man that is the prefect socio-economic fit for her and her family, and my eyes glaze over. I almost I wish I was talking to the law students at the Seder table.

I mean, I don’t know what I was expecting at this place. I think I was hoping that with a lifestyle choice that was so outside the mainstream there would be ideas and ideals that would be equally radical. Instead, it just seems like all of the some old social conventions are intact so that it’s the same old song with just a different name. The only difference is that leather, chains and whips have traded places with the black mini skirts, cosmos, and push up bras.

While Kelly has been talking she has off-handedly drawn an animation wireframe of a character reclining on a chair on the chalkboard, and a sketch of Amber’s face. I note that they are amazingly detailed and that she has real talent. It’s just a shame that she has a personality limper than a ten-inch rubber dildo.

As their conversation peters down and Kelly eventually stops talking about herself, Amber and her decide to have a “little fun.”

Taking a paddle lying at the edge of the room, we all circle around the bench in the center.

“You wanna try it?” Amber asks me, paddle in hand.

“Being spanked?”

“Or spanking me?”

“Not really…” I trail off prudishly.

THACK!

I jump in pain.

“Ouch Amber! That really hurt!”

“Duh! That’s the point, Mark,” laughs Amber with the paddle held impishly skyward.

I steadfastly refuse to be paddled, so Kelly and Amber decide to practice their beatings on each other. First Amber is bent over and strapped in, while Kelly wields the majestic rubber paddle. Then Amber takes her turn as the punisher. After each hit, they rub the red welt with their hands, as if they contains some magical ointment. Then they raise the paddle and hit again. People drift in and out of the room to watch. As Amber is finishing up spanking Kelly, the Indian man that I had seen before in the same room enters. He seems to have a particular fascination with Kelly and he asks her if he can spank her. Ass still in the air and arms strapped down, Kelly looks behind her, sizing up his non-designer jeans, frumpy ruffled shirt, and tussled black hair.

“Uh, I don’t think so, ok?” she shoots back at him.

Dismayed, but undaunted, he turns to ask Amber and she readily acquiesces. After strapping her in, he starts gently at first gearing up with progressively solid "thwacks." Amber winces then laughs between blows, and seems to enjoy it. Following the same ritual as the girls, he rubs the reddened portions of her ass with a broad smile before administering each successive blow. Kelly and I are sitting in the front row of the little classroom, while moment by moment I am increasingly creeped-out. Maybe I am a prude, but I just don’t get off on watching people get spanked. Especially unattractive, middle-aged guys spanking a young, attractive twenty-somethings.

But since the law of the land was either spank or be spanked, I was the only odd man out.

When they were done and the man had removed the straps, he thanked Amber with an overly obsequious handshake and with a very formal “thank you” left the room.

I rub my head. I am ready to go.

“You look tired, Mark? Are you ready to go?” asks Amber, sitting next to me on the miniature school desks.

“No” I lie. “All of this is great.”

Amber looks at me skeptically.

“Actually,” Kelly says, “I think I am ready to go.”

“Ok, I think I’m done then, I’ve ordered the corset and everything. Do you want to stay?” Amber asks me.

“Nope,” I reverse my opinion a little too eagerly.

“Ok, so we can walk out together.”

As we walk down the hall I hear the sound of a single gunshot on the movie in the main room. I don’t need to turn around to know that this is the scene in which Ilsa the She Wolf is finally shot and killed against a wall for her war crimes.

We walk past the bar with the cheeky bartender, past Nazis and Allied Force members, down a hallway, through the reception room with the intimidating bouncer, then out the front entrance and into the cold, Pacific-Ocean-smelling LA air.

Kelly thanks us for us meeting her there and we head off to Amber’s car. The night is cool and clear.

“That was interesting wasn’t it?” says Amber.

“Yes” I respond.

“Bet you didn’t think you would spend Seder like that?”

“No,” I say.

I look upward and focus my eyes on the impenetrable gray above us, feeling the chill air collecting dew on my face. Someone once told me that all the city lights of Los Angeles drown out the real stars so that now everything looks like a hazy in-between. There is the loud but still-distant roar of a plane’s engine approaching. It comes closer but I don’t turn toward it. The sound is louder than the night, and I want it to do something for me that I can’t seem to express, even to myself. I stare upward waiting for it, something just on the border of nothingness. In a crush of air so loud it hurts my ears, the white smooth body of a 747 interrupts my vision, so close above my head that it seems I can touch it, grab on to the wheels extending for landing.

Closing my eyes, I absorb its white outline floating on the underside of my lids. The sound fills my ears, vibrating and pushing inward against my skull. When the roar has regressed to a faint buzz, I open them again. The plane is gone. As static and comforting as anything I have ever seen, the gray starless night of Los Angeles is above me.

How Santa Saved Me from Becoming a Republican

I’m not sure where my Catholic School teacher is, but I’d like to thank her for many things. I’d like to thank her for making me critical of politicians and most authority figures. I’d like to thank her for making me cynical of life in general and people in particular. I’d even like to thank her for making me cautious around homes with chimneys for fear that sparrows will drop down at any moment and burst into flames. But most importantly, I’d like to thank her for destroying my belief in Father Christmas himself, Santa Claus.

All of this happened at Catholic school the day before Christmas. If you really want to be more correct, I didn’t go to Catholic school, but to an after school Catholic “education program” known as “Confraternity of Christian Doctrine.” To be honest, I had no idea that this was the real name of the program until I “Googled” while writing this. As far as most of us kids knew, the program was simply CCD, and like many things in religion, the abbreviation was never explained, leaving our mischievous 8-year-old minds to come up with our own explanation for the acronym (“Crazy Catholic Donkeys” was my favorite). For the majority of these classes we learned prayers, colored pictures of Jesus and the Apostles, or were subjected to stories of God’s love and his infinite mercy for our sinful 8-year old natures.

The day before Christmas, however, took on a particularly different tenor of joy and excitement. Because many of the people in our congregation were Mexican, many of our traditions came from Latino culture, and on Christmas Eve we celebrated the tradition known as “Las Posadas.” I’m not really sure how this event is celebrated in Mexico, but over here in the states it’s a weird tradition that resembles a cross between Christmas Caroling and begging for money. To reenact the night of Jesus’ birth two people dressed as Mary and Joseph go door to door asking for “room at the inn.” They’re repeatedly turned away and the crew following them marches from house to house until a residence representing the stable where Christ was born finally lets everyone in to get plastered at a huge party. You know, exactly like the bacchanalian orgy of the naivety two-thousand years prior (minus the kinky donkeys and cattle).

Since it would be both strange and creepy to set a group of 8-year-olds loose in a neighborhood asking to spend the night at strangers’ houses (and most of the white neighbors wouldn’t understand anyway), we just simulated “Las Posadas” by going door to door to the rooms of the Catholic school hosting the CCD classes-- kind of like an off-season trick-or-treat.

I have a feeling we were mixing traditions somewhere, but before we left to shuffle around in our dirty grey socks, we took off our shoes and left them in front of our classroom with the promise of a “special surprise” when we got back. Thus, our midget brigade led by a 4-foot tall Joseph and rather careless Virgin Mary who swung a Cabbage Patch Jesus by the leg and knocked on the doors with his face, went from classroom to classroom asking for “room at the inn” in an annoying children’s chorus. Finally, after “discovering” that we could not spend the night amid textbooks and chalk dust, we returned to our classroom to find our shoes filled with candy. Yup! Shoes filled to the tips of your tippy toes with cavity causing delights!

Pretty disgusting, but as a child you don’t think about toe jam in your Snickers Bar and if your Tootsie Pop hits the ground, you just wipe off the dirty part and keep on eating, because really, germs are only there if you can taste them. (Duh!)

While I enjoyed an “LA Gear” flavored candy cane in the back corner of the classroom, I watched our CCD instructor walk to the front of the class. A slightly plump middle aged woman with black hair encircling her head in a bowl-cut, she wore thick round glasses, and a frumpy purple dress.

“Ok now!” she clapped her hands, as she tried to pry our attention away from the taxonomy exercise of sorting and riffling through our candy.

“Eyes up here!” she shouted.

All of us quieted down, and pretended to pay attention as we carefully unwrapped our candy underneath our desks.

It was time, once again, for our annual religious parable before Christmas. Each holiday, in fact, our CCD instructor would enlighten us with one “inspiring story” that all of us made sure to immediately forget. However, the parable of my second-grade year was to be so singularly distinct, distressing, and strange that it would change my life forever—oh yes, forever.

“Ok,” my CCD instructor began. “Everyone knows that Jesus is the reason for the season,” she tapped a student’s desk both for rhetorical effect and to draw the eyes of fifteen hungry eight-year-olds who were busy unwrapping Gobstoppers and candy canes.

“But sometimes,” she glared, “we forget.”

She picked up a battered black bible and paced the room.

“You know, children. If we have faith and we pray to Jesus Christ—truly pray to him with our pure hearts and souls-- what we wish for will come true.

“Some of you may doubt this, but today I am going to tell you a story that happened not so long ago, not so far from here, with a family that was very, very poor. In fact, they barely had enough money to pay the rent on their house, which was very small, and they often struggled to buy food to eat. Certainly, didn’t have any money for candy,” she rasped this last word like a wicked witch.

We all gasped in distress. No candy? Ever? That was a dire situation indeed.

“So this family, they had a six year old son. And it was the night before Christmas and the family had just finished eating their usual meal, which was very small, consisting of only a can of beans, some limp frozen vegetables that had been thawed, and water.”

I unwrapped a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup and absent-mindedly nibbled on the outer edge, saving the peanut butter inside for last.

“This family was still hungry when they finished,” my instructor continued, but that was all they had. But no one ever complained, and together they did the dishes and then all gathered around the fire in their living room. It was there that their son asked them a question. He looked up at them and asked them if he had been very good that year.

“‘Of course,’ they said. He was a very good boy and he always did what he was told.

“’Then Santa Claus will bring me presents!’ the boy smiled and pointed to his single stocking hanging on the fireplace, pulling down his list for Santa he had taped up.

“’Look,’ he excitedly showed his mom and dad. ‘That means that Santa will bring me a pet! I wrote it right here!’”

I nodded, happily licking into the bottom edge of a candy cane. That sounded about right to me.

“But his parents were very sad,” my teacher continued. “They told their child that Santa was very busy and couldn’t get to every house and explained that sometimes even good children didn’t get presents.”

Hearing this I was completely puzzled. Perhaps I was just a strange or immature child, but in the second grade, but I definitely still believed in Jolly Saint Nick. Why then, wouldn’t Santa give this little boy presents? Maybe he had done something really bad, I thought. Like pulled some girl’s hair, or threw sand in the sandbox. Something he hadn’t told his parents.

“But,” said my teacher, “the little boy didn’t listen to his parents, and instead went to bed happily singing how Santa would bring him gifts.”

“Alone together long after the boy had left, his parents sat by the fire discussing things. ‘What are we going to do they asked each other? What can we do? Santa isn’t going to come.’”

Here my teacher stopped pacing and stood squarely facing the class.

“And we all know why Santa wasn’t coming, right? Because there is no Santa Claus. Your parents are Santa Claus.”

The candy cane almost dropped from my mouth.

I repeated what she had just said in my mind.

“There is no Santa Claus.”

“Your parents are Santa Claus.”

I felt a cold wet lump forming in my stomach and I looked around the room to see the other children’s reactions. A few were nodding but the rest were still lazily eating as if our teacher had said simple and obvious, like “rocks are heavy.”

Alone in the back of the room I stifled a sob. Soon however, a cold dark feeling in my chest welled into a quick stifling contraction, and I covered my face holding back the burning tears gathering at the corners of my eyes.

I was completely destroyed at this point—what my instructor had just said sent a seismic crack down the foundations of my world and everything else passed before my senses in a roiling blur.

However, like individuals in so many traumatic situations, some strange part of my subconscious turned on like the black box found in the rubble of airline crashes. It must have, because although I remember the rest of my teachers story, if not precisely, extremely well, at the time it was all I could do to try to hold myself together. Because of this, almost all of the following reactions to my teacher's story came entirely in retrospect.

“So, no Santa Claus. No Santa Claus at all,” my teacher echoed. “What were they to do? They knew that Santa Claus wouldn’t be coming, but what could they do? They were poor.” Here she gave a conspirational smile that just seemed sadistic to me. “Late, late into the night the parents continued to talk and talk to each other. Finally deciding that there was nothing they could do. ‘It was time to go to bed,’ they said, hanging their heads. However, right before they put their fire out, they stopped and said a prayer to Jesus Christ our Lord.

“’Please,’ they lifted their heads to heaven, ‘we are very poor and don’t have any money to buy our son a present for Christmas. He believes that Santa will bring him a pet for Christmas, but in reality we have nothing for him. Please our Lord Jesus, if you are listening, we pray to you with all our hearts to help us provide our son with a Merry Christmas on this, the day of your birth.”

“Then, with heavy hearts they put out their fire and went to sleep.

“At about this time as the smoke and ashes from the coals in their fireplace were floating up the chimney. They went up into the night, high into the air above the house.

“And you know what? At exactly this time a little baby sparrow was flying through the air over their house. He flew over the chimney, and as he flew he was overcome with the smoke and ash and dropped straight down the chimney.

“And you know where the little sparrow fell into.”

Here the natural, logical response is the burning coals of the fire where he died a terrible fiery death. Because really, that’s what would have happened. But no, Jesus would never allow that.

“Do all of you know where that little sparrow fell?” my teacher repeated for emphasis.

Everyone (except me) shook their heads.

“That little baby sparrow, that treasure of God, fell straight into that little boy’s stocking!”

Ok, wow. This truly is a miracle, because unless the family hung their stockings inside the fireplace or the little sparrow, with smoke scorching and burning the alveoli in his lungs fell downward, almost hit the coals, pulled up like a jet in Top Gun, did a U-turn and flew into the stocking, I have no freaking idea how this could happen.

“You see!” my teacher exclaimed. “You see! A miracle happened that very day! This poor little boy received the pet that he had wanted all along just by his parents praying and believing in Jesus Christ.

“So the moral of this story is that if you truly believe in Jesus Christ and pray to him with all your heart, your prayers will be answered.

“Got it? Now remember that as we celebrate the birth of our Lord.”

There was a high copper clanging of the schools bells.

“Class dismissed”

As I collected that candy wrappers of Christmas treasures I had eaten before my teacher’s revelation about Father Christmas, I ran from the class, traveling through the desperation of hopeless confusion. I hardly remember walking to the parking lot. I was in a daze, trying with all my might to suppress my tears as I made my way to my mother’s car. For a while I was silent, but then I couldn’t hold it anymore and I told her what had happened. She listened with a furrow of concern creasing her forehead, looking occasionally at my tiny seat-buckled form.

“But,” I said, “That isn’t true. Santa Claus exists…right?”

My mother said nothing, and simply pursed her lips and stared at the road. She didn’t have to say anything then. I knew—there was nothing more to say. The dam broke and hot tears flowed down my cheeks. I couldn’t have been more depressed if I had suddenly found out that my parent’s had adopted me. Or turned out to be aliens. After all I actually believed these things and they were a part of my reality. A wrecking ball went through my mind as my tiny world came tumbling down. Like an assassin sneaking through the dark alleys and convolutions of my mind, the holiday spirits of my childhood were shot dead one by one.

“The Easter Bunny…” I wiped tears from my eyes.

Once again my mother said nothing, and sniper of reality took down another victim.

“And the Tooth Fairy.”

“…”

A shot to the head.

“What is real?”

“Some things are just…in your heart…” my mother touched my arm.

I pulled away quickly. In confused mess of tears, snot, and anger, I wiped my nose with my open palm and rested my head against the window.

************************************************************

The next day I heard that my mother had paid the CCD teacher a very, very angry visit. I can only imagine because even today now my mother can be a very frightening person in an angry argument. I wasn’t around but I was later informed that the CCD teacher had told my mother that she was only doing “God’s work” and telling us the story to increase our “faith in Him.” I just hope they were in a soundproof room when my mother had a chance to respond.

As for me, I was depressed for weeks. While I considered the deception of these fictional characters that I had thought were real enough to touch, my eight-year-old mind expanded the scope of its doubt and inquiry.

If I had believed in such things without question, and they had turned out to be false, what other things in the world were lies? How many lies were my teachers telling me? How many lies did the world believe and propagate?

Following this line of reasoning it was a single hop, skip, and jump to doubting God Himself. After all, didn’t I have my illusions shattered during a parable meant to make me believe in another “mysterious” being?

Was God a fraud like Santa Claus? Such a big lie that even adults were taken in? Were there teachers teaching the CCD instructors who actually knew a grander or more dismal nihilistic truth of the world? Ironically through this story I became doubtful of the very God they meant to increase my faith in.

I eventually got over the most radical doubt and settled into a happily jaded middle ground of agnosticism. However, I have to say that this was the start of a more critical evaluation of teachers, pundits, politicians, books, newspapers—almost everything.

In a way I’m actually grateful to my CCD teacher. If she hadn’t disillusioned me in such a profound manner, I might have unquestioned faith in the exact written word of the Bible, believe that racial bias is a thing of the past, think that people are only poor because they don’t work hard, think that socialism is an absolute evil, and believe uncritically that American international policy truly is the best thing since sliced bread—in short I might have been a Republican!

After hearing this story people often ask me if I would ever perpetuate the myth of Santa Claus with my own children.

“Absolutely,” I tell them.

“But,” some people point out cynically. “Wouldn’t you be training your own children to believe unequivocally in a lie? A lie that you, yourself, found so distasteful?”

“No,” I always tell them, “because I would also enroll them in CCD.”

-Mark Jordan

Papier-mâché Giants

“I actually just get the director coffee or whatever he wants.”

“What?” I asked looking up from my computer.

“Yeah, that’s all I really do. Get drinks, run errands, stuff like that,” Rakesha leaned back on the futon in our living room and passed the joint to Silvana who took a long drag.

I couldn’t believe that Rakesha was saying this. She must be so stoned out of her mind that she didn’t know what she was talking about.

“But you do other stuff too, right?” I tried to clarify.

“Nope,” she took a swig of beer, “just get him stuff, like a lackey.”

This made my heart drop. Rakesha was always coming to our apartment bragging to us that she is the assistant director on a film, but it turns out that she is the assistant to the director. I mean, I never believed even half of the crap that she’s been spewing over the past two months that I’ve been here, but it just seemed sad and strangely pathetic to lie about this.

But this seems to be pandemic in New York—everyone lies or “overinflates” what they do to epic proportions. Because of this everyone is a fabulous actor in a hit Broadway play, is having their script sold for millions, or has a painting that the MoMA is going to include in an upcoming show. The egos here are absolutely astounding, and if I could steal even a sliver of this self-confidence I might just feel a little bit better in my own artistic skin.

As it stands, I always feel uneasy describing me as a writer, preferring instead to call myself “a person that writes.” Maybe if I could actually sell a short story or an article, I could call myself a writer, but until then, I’ll just stick to “unemployed.”

In the gamut of gargantuan egos, Rakesha’s in particular has always annoyed me. She usually comes into our house and right away starts telling us how she is going to use her Columbia Film Degree to direct a film which will “enlighten the ignorant hicks that populate most of this country.” God-- she just bugs me! So when she lay on the futon, drunk and stoned and finally admitted to being a fraud in the chuckling stoner laugh that meant that she would forget everything the next day, I should have been happy. Right? My feelings toward Rakesha were like the ugly girl that hates, envies, and obsesses over the perfect high school cheerleader. But now I that had just watched this “cheerleader” break her neck during a throw at a homecoming game, my heart dropped. It’s one of those things you see over and over in your mind, wishing it to happen—but when it actually does, you don’t feel relief or happiness, or really anything at first, just sadness and disgust. I felt like I was like watching a papier-mâché giant fall and crumble to the ground.

A lot of this is narcissistic though, because I think I secretly thought that if a person like Rakesha could make it then there was a chance that I could too. But she hasn’t made it, and she’s been lying about what she’s done, and it depresses me profoundly.

“I’m going to go to live in LA in a week, and where I will finally be directing a film,” she told me yesterday.

Later, I learned that she is simply following the director she’s working with to be his go-fer in a new location as he raps up production.

“It’ll be great there,” she said. “I just hope I can keep my artistic edge. People in Los Angeles are so fake. It’s not like the people out here in New York at all.”

I couldn’t even smirk at the irony on this one. It just depressed the shit out of me and I went into my room, drew the blinds, and tried to take a nap.

I try not to stay inside too much these days because it just makes my inertia more apparent, because days are turning to weeks, and nothing seems to be happening. I’m struggling in a big city, and I don’t even know if I can do what I’ve set out to do. In fact, I don’t even really know what I’ve set out to do.

I listen day after day to artists and their egos, and I no longer wish them ill will. I don’t want the cheerleader to fall and break her neck because, sad and pathetic as it may be, even ugly kids like me get a little happiness by proxy when she becomes prom queen.

Rakesha leaves for LA on Friday, and she’s going out tonight to celebrate with one of my roommates. I didn’t go. I just can’t take it. Not because of the grating irritation that I used to feel, but because of the completely pathetic irony that I absorb in a more personal sense when I'm around her.

“I’m going to have my own place near Santa Monica! It’s going to be really great because I have some ideas for things I would like to direct. Everything’s really going to be better for me out on the West Coast.”

I hope she makes it. I really do. But as my throat tightens against me and my stomach churns, I contemplate that we may be on the same sinking ship-- only she can’t see the holes in her reality.

-Mark Jordan

Jew Me

Have you ever wondered how to make a Jew?

No? Too bad, because I’m going to tell ya’ anyway.

You take an Italian and Mexican add two years of courtship, three years of marriage, many cold rainy days in March spent in a tiny house, a Barry White album or two, and bam! nine months later out pops a Jew.

Sound a little wacky? I think so, but that must be how it works because I am constantly being mistaken for a Jew despite having parents of Mexican and Italian heritage. So what does a Jew look like to all of these schmucks? Apparently the quintessential Jew-Boy has a bunch of curly brown hair sprouting from his head like a stalk of broccoli, a big nose, ears that stick out from the side of his head, and a slightly gawky look that makes people think I must be really good at chess or Scrabble (I’m terrible at both).

Unfortunately, over the years it’s this image that has become the Hollywood standard for the dopy, but lovable, Jew-kid that usually ends up the butt of some geek joke. If it’s a high school movie, there’s almost certainly a scene in which the character finds himself calling for help from inside of a locker. This would have been physically impossible at any of my schools because our lockers were only a foot and a half tall, but during my middle school days I was constantly teased with the name “Screech,” the sad little nerdy tag-along from “Saved by the Bell.” I never really watched the series myself, and I’m not even sure is this guy was supposed to be Jewish, but whenever somebody didn’t know my name, they usually referenced me as that “nerdy Jewish dude that looks like Screech.” As you can imagine, I was a huge hit with the ladies.

Things really didn’t get better with time. As I grew older and Adam Sandler gained popularity, I was called “Happy Gilmore” or the “Water Boy.” I actually didn’t mind this as much, because Sandler kind of funny and I’ve memorized enough of his Saturday Night Live skits to do a pretty good impression of him as “Crazy Protractor Man” or “the goat” from his comedy CD (and yes, I can sing most versions of the “Hanukah Song”).

However, after a while the comparison did grow a little tiresome. And when my mom, who’s an elementary school teacher, put my photograph on her desk and the school children excitedly clamored for her to get autographs from her son, “Mr. Deeds,” I was more than ready for a change. Couldn’t there be a really cool Jewish kid in a Hollywood film or show that looked at like me? Like some kid that’s a spy, or a ninja, or even a super smart dude like the guy in “Hackers” that rides neon rollerblades and hooks up with Angelina Jolie?

Pleaseeeee Hollywood? Pretty please?

Apparently my cries fell on deaf ears, because aside from a very brief comparison to John Stewart (which I was extremely flattered by until I found out that this same person had the racial myopia to think that Wesley Snipes and Ving Rhames looked the same) things just got worse. Much worse.

In 1999, months before I was supposed to go to college and finally enjoy the wonders of manhood in a flurry of drunken parties and crazy co-ed orgies (or so I thought), Jason Biggs entered the scene. Why was this bad? Because Jason Biggs made me a pie fucker. I didn’t literally start fucking pies, but Biggs, as my doppelganger, “wowed” audiences everywhere by sticking his male member into this crusty American fav. This culinary fornication occurs after Bigg’s “loser virgin” character is told by his much cooler friends that a vagina feels exactly like “warm apple pie.” So of course, one scene later he’s in the kitchen making strudel with his jimmy noodle when his parents walk in. Not nice. But even worse was the fact that I actually looked like this guy! Almost exactly like this guy! And once again he was Jewish. Waaaaay Jewish. Reinforcing this was his dad, played by the nasally, Groucho-Marxish Eugene Levy.

It wasn’t long before people were calling me “pie fucker” from across the street while high-fiving their friends, or stopping me to say that I looked extremely familiar.

“Do I know you?” they would ask.

“Nope,” I would respond trying to ignore what I knew was coming.

“No, I think I’ve seen you somewhere…”

“Nope.”

“No really.”

“God,” I would sigh, giving up. “Ok, you probably just think you know me because you’ve seen my alter-ego masturbating into a pie on the movie screen.”

“Oh, the ‘pie fucker’!”

“You got it!”

Ugh. Why couldn’t Jason Biggs just disappear? Just shove his dick, his legs, his arms, his whole freakin’ body into a pie and fuck off?

But he didn’t.

In fact, he followed up American Pie, with “American Pie 2” in 2001, and “American Pie 3” in 2003, giving him plenty of opportunities to shave his balls on screen, help his friend eat a piece of dog crap, and stick his genitals into people and places they should never have gone. Oh, and along the way he made “Loser.” Yeah, real great movie. And as you can imagine, he’s wasn’t exactly a super stud in it.

With the cultural sensitivity that Hollywood is known for, Biggs’ “Jewiness” was usually a shticky punch line, so that his characters stutter like a young Woody Allen and kvetch like an old woman- which made me very happy, and excited, to be compared to him.

Soon after American Pie came out the obvious resemblance between Biggs and myself filtered down far enough to reach my family. When my mom saw the posters and billboards with Biggs holding a pie over his groin, she would always say with pride that “I looked just like that handsome Jewish boy in all the movies.”

“Moooom, that’s gross. Do you know what he does in that film? Plus, he’s a terrible loser that everyone laughs at!”

“Oh, no, I think he’s actually very sweet. Girls love him for that.”

“Yeah… mom I think girls like ‘Stiffler’ in those movies better than Biggs!”

Even my dad, who usually doesn’t even remember movies he’s seen, caught the resemblance. After returning to school after one spring break I received a sock in the mail.

“What the hell is this?” I thought, unfolding a note.

“I found this alone behind your door,” my dad wrote. “Don’t worry. It’s washed.”

It took me a second to realize that my dad was referencing the opening scene of American Pie in which Biggs gets caught by his parents masturbating into a gym sock.

Nice. Really dad? How could you?

I shouldn’t be totally mad at Biggs. After all he has it pretty bad too. I did a little research recently and found out that he’s not even Jewish!

“Everyone thinks I’m Jewish,” complains Biggs in an interview with the “Jewish Journal.”

No shit, Biggs. You play a Jew in nearly every role. But if he’s not Jewish, exactly what breed of Gentile is he? It turns out he’s an Italian Catholic from New Jersey, which actually explains why he looks a lot like me. I guess it really doesn’t matter to Hollywood though—they’re equal opportunity stereotypers. If you look like a Jew, talk like a Jew, and walk like a Jew, than damn it, get ready, because you’re going to be cast as a Jew! I may not be a movie star like you, Mr. Biggs, but like a freshly cut putz, I feel your pain.

Although I’m not competing for roles in stereotyped casting calls, my fake Jewiness has led to some amusing situations in the workplace.

Once I was in a cafeteria with one of my coworkers when she asked if “it was difficult for me to find food to eat.”

Food to eat? In cafeteria?? Maybe she just thought I was vegetarian.

“No,” she told me. Is it difficult to eat Jewish here?”

“Eat Jewish?” Ugh. I was really annoyed, but decided to go along with it. Because I had dated a Jewish girl from Israel months before, I knew just a little bit about Jewish custom. And my co-worker hadn’t really asked if I was Jewish, so…

“Well,” I scanned the food with mock concern. “I suppose if you were Glatt Kosher, it would be a problem. But then you’d probably bring your own lunch. I’m not, so that’s not a problem.” Which was true. It wasn’t a problem for me. Because I wasn’t Jewish!

“Oh,” she said. “But if you’re just Kosher-Kosher, you know? You can still eat in the cafeteria?”

“Well,” I said making a cheese, bacon, and ham sandwich, “I suppose you could find something to eat here...”

My co-worker noticed my extremely non-kosher sandwich and watched with grimace of confusion as I took a big bite.

There was a pause as I chewed.

“You’re not Jewish are you?”

“No,” I said through another mouthful of cheese and bacon, “I’m not.”

Situations like this come up randomly all the time in the office, but the main time that my faux-Jewishness is sure to draw comment is around holidays. In most offices across America, Christmas means tinsel and pine trees, Rudolph and Santa, angels singing and wise men with gifts—but no menorah. To be honest I usually don’t notice it because I really don’t care about holiday decorations whatsoever. However, with all the poinsettias adorning shelves and holly bordering every in and out box, it’s hardly surprising that some “ethnically sensitive” person usually comes up to me to ask the big “J-Boy” pride question.

“Are you sad that we’re celebrating Christmas and not Hanukkah in the office?” one co-worker once asked me.

Like my cafeteria experience, they never bothered to ask me if I was actually Jewish. Just if I was sad. I told them that I was “sad” that we didn’t give Hanukah at least a little attention. Which really wasn’t a lie. I get pretty sick of seeing candy canes, fake inflatable snowmen, and nativities--just about anything to change it up would be great.

Still, I should have shut my mouth and given a simple “no,” because two days later I was presented with little cupcakes bearing white frosting and a huge Star of David drawn on top with blue icing. But, really, what could I do at that point? It’s hard to fess up when a lie tastes creamy and delicious!

In fact my ethno-fakism always got me tasty treats, I’d keep up the lie, but it’s usually just gets me bothersome questions or expectations. At my last job the crew went all out for Christmas, decorating our office with a diorama of children skating across a mirror ice pond, placing up a poster of a fake Christmas hearth, hanging tinsel from the sealing, and cramming miniature Santa Clauses in just about every nook and cranny they could find (almost).

As usual I didn’t do anything for Christmas, preferring to leave my sad little gray cubicle plastered with month old Post-it reminders and my festive 1980’s Rolodex.

“Common, Mark! Don’t be such a party pooper!” my co-workers encouraged me. “Our decorations are an office tradition!”

“Fine,” I rolled my eyes, “but I don’t want to buy anything.”

“Oh, no you don’t have to! We have some stuff just for you!”

Just for me?

The next thing I knew I was being given several long, blue coils of thin wire, wrapped in tiny, shiny blue stars that stuck out like “festive” barbs.

“What is that??” I eyed the glittering blue stars skeptically.

“You don’t like it? But it’s blue with stars! For your cubicle! Like for Hanukah!”

Holy freakin’ Jews for Jesus! Had they just given me what looked like blue “festive” barbed wire for a Jewish holiday?

Although was ridiculous, they meant well, and I didn’t want another cupcake fiasco (my conscience had finally caught up with me), so I did eventually tell them that I wasn’t Jewish. However, I first took the opportunity to “decorate” my cubicle, coiling the festive wire into large loops and taping it along the top parameter of my “enclosure” and around the front entrance.

“What are you doing?” a co-worker asked me, touching the pointed, jutting stars to see if they were actually sharp.

“I’m celebrating Christmas in Auschwitz,” I told her without looking up from my computer.

I guess that aside from being given decorations more suited for concentration camps, it’s not always so bad to be thought of as a geeky Jewish boy. I think that some girls actually kinda dig it. Over the years I have been accused of having an Asian fetish, but I honestly think that there are certain girls out there with a fetish for the J-Boys.

How do I know this? Well, Facebook (aka Stalkerbook) and MySpace, have provide an easy route to see who your exes are currently dating. More often than not I find pictures of my ex’s with very proper looking real Jews, sometimes with slightly smaller noses, sometimes with bigger or smaller Jew-fros, and sometimes with red, or black hair, but more likely than not the similarity’s so uncanny it’s frightening.

This fetish can be taken too far, and I have found that in spite of their love for little Hebrew boys, many Jew-Fetishists, or “J-Fed’s” (no relation to Britney’s amazingly talented ex-husband), really can’t tell their Jews from their Gentiles (no pun intended). This has led to some amusing and particularly advantageous situations.

On one particular occasion, I had been working up the courage to speak to an attractive young lady at a bar, but I couldn’t quite figure out what to say. It took me several solid hours of careful contemplation and five or six shots before I finally settled on the ingenious, “Hi, my name is Mark. How’re you doing?”

However, almost soon as I started to introduce myself she stopped me. “God Jeremy, have your forgotten me already? You were just talking to me about your trip to Israel!”

Trip? Israel? I looked at her with wide eyes, and she gave me a little pinch on my side and a tug at my belt loop.

Now, I have to say that I no idea who “Jeremy” is or what happened to him that night, but apparently he made a fabulous impression and was an absolutely spectacular opener. I definitely owe him a dozen roses and a box of chocolates for an amazing weekend. Shalom, Jeremy wherever you are.

Of course, not everyone’s a J-Fed. In fact, aside from their looks, I also get to share the superficial racism directed toward Jews. Not that I really experience it that often. I just really wish that rednecks could get their pejoratives straight! Why do I always have to be a “hebe” or a “kike”? Common guys! Get it right and call me a “beaner,” “wetback,” “goomba,” or even a “whop”! Then I could sleep a little better at night (as long as you aren’t trying to burn down my house).

Things usually aren’t that extreme, but I frequently do get the lame white American apologist. The white American apologist for Jews is very similar to the white American apologist for blacks in America. For blacks they seem to feel personally and confusingly responsible on a very direct immediate level for putting blacks into bondage and setting them to work on plantations. They grovel and insist to black people that they actually have “some very nice black friends,” like hip-hop music, and would never use the “N” word. I don’t understand these people, and unless they still have some residual guilt from Catholic school, they need to just volunteer at an inner city Boys & Girls Club and get that shit out of their system.

Accordingly apologist for Jews in America follows a comparable line of “logic” and seems to feel personally responsible for anything that has ever gone wrong for the “chosen people” over the last century or so. Just the other night, in fact, I was at a bar talking to a group of nurses from Colorado when they started to discuss the Holocaust. Why were they talking about the Holocaust? Probably because they were drunk and I was within their line of sight (or at least my nose was blocking their view).

“Oh, it was so terrible,” one patted my arm as if the Holocaust happened yesterday and I had somehow experienced an event that took place in the 40’s.

“Yeah, it was pretty “terrible,” I reiterated. “Fifteen million people wiped off the face of the planet is pretty ‘terrible.’”

“But don’t worry, the other one told me taking a swig from her glass. I’m not anti-semantic.”

“Wait,” I said. “Anti-semantic? Like against language?” I stopped drinking my beer. “You’re not Anti-semantic? That’s, like, a double negative. Does that mean that you’re into good grammar and prose?”

“Huh,” the girl said, still not understanding.

“Like ‘semantics,’ words, organization…usage…instead of ‘Semitic’…which is…”

The other girls looked at me with open mouths like cows chewing cud.

“Never mind…”

Really, what am I supposed to do with that?

I just wish that people would see me and associate my appearance with other, more positive Jewish stereotypes. Like, why can’t they just assume I’m a rich lawyer or a Hollywood talent agent? Maybe I just need better clothes.

I once had a friend that would complain to me about her overbearing Jewish mother.

“Really,” she told me, “be glad you’re not Jewish.”

“I think I will,” I said, “just as soon as the rest of the world realizes I’m not.”


-Mark Jordan ©2009