00 Departure
01 Initiation
02 Crossing back the Threshold
—————— a (Goodbye Shyness)
☞————— b (Girls)
—————— c (Gwen — Prelude)
—————— d (Sportsman Inn Bootybanger)
—————— e (Gwen)
03 Rebuild of Evangelion
I've come a long way since commiserating with Shinji at 13. There's still bashfulness inherent to my demeanour and much self second guessing, but I wouldn't say I were shy anymore. Still careful, uncertain, lacking confidence and bold only after premeditation, but not shy. But there's still a category of people that puts me in those same early pubescent shoes, or, more exactly, a type of interpersonal contact. Girls.
We'll start, as Freud would like it, in the beginning, but we'll leave my mother out of it. To relieve the reader from the taxing need to keep in mind the cast of characters that as in real life come in and out with disregard to any overarching narrative order, I present:
Dramatis personae
Tali — middle-school classmate and formally girlfriend
Adva — high-school classmate and girlfriend
Arina — kendo peer and interest
Yana — kendo peer and interested
Mikalai — kendo peer
Toma — college friend
Pepe — college best buddy
Almas — college friend and member of the Russian speaking clique
Regina — college friend and member of the Russian speaking clique
Kenneth — Regina's friend
Gwen —Wooed college one
Childhood
During the Kindergarten of Eden's age of innocent , I had female friends, at least two. Two I remember. It's hard to say if I imagine remembering based on the photos that exist, or whether the photos served to cement the memory over the years. I remember the rolling laughter of one of them, with whom I got into my parents' bed in their absence, where we would be caught and paparazzied by my father. Decades later I learned that he joked with her mother that the problem would be all hers.
Then one bites into the fruit of knowledge at school, boys and girls self-segregate by a force still mysterious.
During first grade, before we moved from the Dizengoff apartment, a class- and school-bus-mate, Tali, used to slip the water bottle out my backpack's side pocket as I got down at my stop and replace it the next morning filled with the potion of the day she had concocted at home. Eventually I learned to monitor the bottles with my elbows. On a couple of venturesome occasions I dared to take a sip at home, found it tasty (cola?), but having an early intuition about not drinking a drink another mixed out of sight (or could it be my mother's guidance?) and taking it to be a pharmaceutical cocktail, it usually went down the drain. Only recently did I first see those kidnaps as a variation of the proverbial tugging at the braids.
When the age came where boys got interested in girls, Tali became my wooed one, and, perhaps consequently, also Kosta's. We vied for her, mostly behind her back and only theoretically. I recall an occurrence, after theater class, when one bragged that she had sat in his proximity. On fifth grade romantic couples began forming. Mostly school bus no. 6 kids, it seems to me. The couples hung out together, there was some kissing, a girl sat on a guy's lap. One day, after much pacing in what was then still my older brother's room, I picked up the phone and rang Tali's house. Asked for her. I wonder how long and how much hemming and hawing it took for the words to come out of my mouth. I asked her if she wanted to be my girlfriend. She said yes. I was over the moon jumping around the room. But I was too shy to talk to her thereafter, perhaps even avoided her. If we exchanged words, it was by accident. It was certainly not for a lack of longing, even of the basest kind. I used to fantasize, before or after, I can't remember, about a camera-mounted dragonfly sized drone with which I could espy her through her window. An imagined window, since though I knew the house, at the very least the street she lived in, I never visited or came by on purpose. I felt awkward in the role I cast myself into and which I did not know how to play. During a Truth or Dare on a slumber birthday party at Ron's house, Tali chose Truth. She was asked whether she had been in love with me before we became together. She said yes but I didn't believe it. I now wonder who it was who questioned her, an ally of mine or hers, it seems to make a difference. As I marched out of class at the end of one day, who knows how many months or years had passed, she slipped a note into my hand. I read it on the school bus. In so many words as the little paper could hold she broke up with me. I felt relief.
Adva
I had my first real girlfriend in high-school. Adva did the hitting on. It's hard for me to say whether I recognized it as such. She is the second girl I remember to ever express obvious interest in me, and that unlike the first, in elementary/ middle-school, who did so explicitly, bashfully and formally, and benefited from no mutual sentiment. I wonder whether Adva, given my hesitation to follow her, would have had success had she not lived a short walk from school, but I think that though it would have been more difficult, with her insistence, overriding my staunch lack of spontaneity, she would have still prevailed. The first time I visited her house was among a bunch of us, invited at the occasion of cancelled classes in the middle of the day. And later it was just me. I was attracted to her attraction towards the arts, a rarity amidst our gifted class. I remember a classmate, a girl, asking me if I and Adva were together, which made me embarrassingly flustered and lost for words. I can't remember if it was before or after that day when, after sipping a concentration made raspberry juice, an Israeli classic, Adva kissed me without warning. We were sitting on her bed behind our friend who sat at the computer typing away her Israblog blog à clef which I would one day reach through a tipoff. I was aliased Legolas and expressed desire towards. She would later join kendo practice for a while and would be tantalized by my changing from civilians to kendo attire in the practice hall. One day Adva told me that when I joined our class, all the girls' eyes were towards me. Now I think perhaps she said it to aggrandize her own achievement, I don't know, a motivation that might have been behind her tipoff too, I guess I got it from her.
We lasted almost two years, until the end of the last high-school summer break. I suppose the relationship was difficult, for both of us. I had the notion that being together we each, or at least I, had a set role to play, partially unknown to me, rather than it being an association established and negotiated by us alone. She was frustrated by my inability to speak my mind. She beseeched me to be assertive, a word I learned from her, to little effect. And in a way it ended due to our, perhaps more specifically my, inability to negotiate. Exasperated, she posed me an ultimatum —she said she wanted to be treated like a princess— that I was happy not to meet.
Female attention
I never became a kind of otaku, gobbling anime en masse, but I did become interested in the insular culture of Japan. Incidentally, it might have brought me to writing. My childhood home, my parents' house, was filled with Russian literature, inaccessible to me. Adva was a reader, but that was not a commonality when we met. Fingering the bookshelf one day at her brother's room, with whom I had a friendly relationship, a book with a kabuki Umeoumaru on the cover caught my fancy, the Hebrew translated Peter Tasker's Samurai Boogie. He suggested that I borrowed it, and I did. It was not a good book, but it started me on reading literature. A few months later, sitting on a plastic chair in their grandmother's sunny yard, I decided I would become a writer, too. It might be noteworthy only retrospectively. I've decided since I would become many things. Rich imagination, what can I say.
It was Adam's tip that brought me to start practicing Kendo, later also Iaido and Jodo that were practiced at the same club. One day a trio joined us: Arina, Mikalai and Yana. They caught my eye by virtue of being around my age, two grades my senior, and as they perused an album book about Princess Mononoke on a sports bench. I remember pacing behind them out the school where practice was, hearing them discussing Bible Black, some salty anime as I understood from their comments. I was kneeling busily with something on the floor when first contact was made: Mikalai, coming in through the curtain that sectioned the basketball court, said something unintelligible to me in passing. It was a few moments after he was gone, unanswered, that I realized that he had spoken Russian to me, that he said привет, hello. How did he know I spoke Russian, I wonder now writing, perhaps he had heard me speaking with my father, perhaps it was a not so wild guess, the looks, the name. Despite that initial lapse of understanding, a loose friendship developed between them and me. I recall eating a McDonald's meal on the above road bridge of Dizengoff-Center with Arina and Yana. Yana just sat by, reluctant being watched eating. The three attended Shevah-Mofet, a renowned high-school closely associated with immigrants from the former Soviet Union,1 and belonged there to a clique called The Cage, named after a detractor's taunt about whither that pack of freaks should be thrown into, the key let lost. Mikalai was as long-haired as I was, Yana was going for a goth look. I believe The Cage had their own PHP forum, I guess that was the uncommon way before Whatsapp groups. Once I hung out with their friends, at the environs of Azrieli Center. My shyness overpowered another fear; walking at the flank, I remained cool as a pickle while a cockroach, which would have otherwise sent me running to the hills, emerged on the sidewalk. It was their friends, but of the trio only Mikalai was there, and as the group crossed the street, Mikalai asked me if I was interested in Yana. Not at all a question I had expected. I expressed some kind of no? It was flattering, the assumption that he had asked it for her sake, but in fact I had had somewhat of an infatuation with Arina, who I suddenly recall blushed as a tomato once when we were partnered in practice, our shinais, bamboo swords, thrusting towards each other. I would learn that Arina had had her eyes on one of the guys, should I say men, of the club, as well as on Spock. I was not on par, let's say. Of the three I instant messaged the most with Arina, but I remember only bits from chats with Yana. I felt embarrassed then and feel embarrassed now, but some belabouring is necessary. The Hebrew slang word kusit is an adjective and noun meaning an attractive woman. It's not a dignified term, derived from kus, equivalent to the English ‘pussy.‘ Yana, whose Hebrew was not perfect, called me kusi, a sensible but ultimately wrong attempt to turn the feminine into a masculine. I believe I corrected her, suggested she might have meant kuson, derived from the same and is equivalent to ‘hunk.’ It may or may not been on the same session that she asked me something sex related, followed by a question whether I was more of a dom or sub. I confessed my innocent lamb inability to answer. I was still in middle-school, mind you, a virgin as they come.
On the same Japanese wave, in the days when it did not yet give off the off-putting aura of fanaticdom, a religion without a government, I took a course in the language. I was again the youngest, it was the first time I sat at the same round table with businessmen, and having the spare time and enthusiasm of youth, I shone in class. One time a coursemate, perhaps the second youngest —I'd guesstimate now she was a university student, in her early twenties— asked me if I would help her with Japanese, perhaps indeed explicitly invited me to her place. I do not remember how I replied. She was attractive, I did not for a second take it for an innocent request, and was eagerly receptive. If for once there was no hesitancy, it may be because I knew we were star-crossed, intuited that it was wrong, I mean to say, that society would not accept us —I sigh and lift the back of my hand to the corner of my forehead— and preclude our union. Yes: to my chagrin, it was challenged by logistics. I had scarcely ever used public transportation until I was in high-school, being instead driven around by my father. Not that he ever leveraged this to pose censure on me. I remember the first time I attended a LARP, a so called live action role playing game, guys wandering around in public fantasy with silver duct taped foam covered PVC swords. I came alone, having known of the event through the adnd.co.il forums, dropped by my father at the rally point outside the dark Yarkon Park. He chatted with the organizer, a smiley tall guy with an amiable face to me, surely merely a boy to an adult, and left me there. It would be only years later that it first crossed my mind that that night my parents at home must have felt concerned, which I verified. Especially concerned, that is; my mother was always worried when I was out. My father also drove me to another town to visit and stay overnight at an online friend's house, a boy a few years my senior, whom I met for the first time. And to the train station to travel to Eilat, at the southernmost tip of Israel, to visit Adam, who taught me how to properly wash Japanese rice, until the water was clear. I've cooked rice this way ever since. And my father picked me up from that dramatic Japanese lesson. I was at least old enough to sit on the front seat, I think. I muttered about the struggling fellow student in need, without conviction, feeling that the picture was clear for all to see. I wonder if it was. It was dropped without developing into a conversation.
I recall on the same vein an Emir Kusturica and the No Smoking Orchestra concert I went to with my friends, it must have still been middle-school. It was outdoors, eventually as much of the audience as could fit would end up dancing on the stage. A young woman made some kind of pass on me, I can't remember. My friends made an interrogation, found out she was 26. They did not approve. I think she walked away not because she suddenly found out how young I was —or could she really not tell?— but due to my friends' mild hostility.
Back to high-school. Post Adva. there was another girl who was attracted to me. I was about to attribute the fact that nothing happened between us to my indecision whether I was reciprocally interested, but I don't think it was it. At least, I did entertain the idea. I was just, then as ever, taking things too seriously, I suppose. Her interest was clear if not by the way she comfortably sat across my bed, leaning on the wall, during a visit, then by the way her mother, whom I met at the library where she worked, spoke as if we were an engaged couple.
What's the point of these? Yes, I suppose indeed I find it pleasant to recall having been an object of attraction to women, occurrences that nonetheless would not weigh in at later points in life when I felt inherently revolting. It was a diffidence that turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. In senior year of college I sprang from my room upon the little party sitting at the common room table of the suite and asked them if they thought I was gay. Toma said she (they?) thought I was asexual. So my memory. Whatever journalistic traces remain record otherwise: on the first day of senior year, having just arrived from NYC, I told Pepe, for whatever reason, that people thought I was gay. He said that they didn't, and that “if he thought anything about me it was that I was asexual.” He or they? Perhaps it was a conversation from April, the end of junior year, that was on my mind telling him that, as if memory on campus skipped over seasonal breaks and it was as if it had happened just a couple of weeks earlier. That April conversation's record is particularly vague: Regina and Almas came to my room, we read each other's palms. After reading Regina's I asked her about a concern that had been evoked by Almas a few days earlier, that I looked gay (and therefore seemingly unavailable to the demographic in question?). From my room we went to a friends' suite where Regina told me “ask them,” and I did. My diary only records that I received “interesting answers.” Still, an email to a friend a couple of months into senior year has me report, “I found [out] that some people thought I’m asexual (and perhaps gay?); I was told that I do not flirt, and that I show no apparent interest in girls. [...] For many years—actually, for all of my life until very recently, I also believed that infatuations, having interest in somebody &c— that all of these should remain in secret. Something you hide away. Only very recently that paradigm [has] shifted in me, and I believe in this no further. In a certain way I’m trying to actually spread the word now that I’m interested in X or Y, sharing it with some friends, though I didn’t get to the point where it’s easy for me to come to someone and tell her I’m interested in her, or ask her on a date (though I feel mentally closer in mind to the person who can do it). More than that, I feel [myself to be] pretty superficial being infatuated with girls I don’t know, being allured mainly by their looks; even though, I know that if I’d get to know them & their personality [sucked], I [wouldn't] like them, and also I [wouldn't] find them as pretty anymore.”
Another nugget from that first day of senior year diary entry. I needed a ride to Red Hook, the neighboring town, to get my stuff. Pepe was supposed to give it to me but he started drinking. I texted Regina, who had graduated but still lived in the environs, and had a car. She told me she could help me only the next day but still I invited her to stop by with Almas and Kenneth. I raked them from the party going on in the opposite suite to sit down and chat in mine. I was prompted to tell them how the day before, on a music festival, a chance girl addressed me by saying she loved my moustache, and before I could open my mouth to answer, I was yanked away by Pepe. Almas said that girls wanted to fuck me after they see my moustache. Regina said they wanted to fuck me even before the moustache. Almas puckered his face and said “what...?” and Regina said “never mind.” I pretended not to have heard it.
That about secrecy stemmed from shame towards feelings of attraction to others. Whence this shame? Not from my education, formal or informal, not that I can see. Was it an excrescence developing out of shyness, that feeling that others were in the know while my own point of view could at best agree, otherwise be rebuked? In early middle school there were boyish discussions around about celebrities and who was hot and who was not, whereby I felt embarrassed and concerned that the question would be turned to me. I felt as if there were right answers, that others were the judges. One guy made definitions for the rest, that yafa, beautiful, was a woman who had an attractive face, kusit had an attractive body and shafa had both. I had already developed a sexual appetite and therewith, supposedly, discrimination, but I had not spent the time to do buzzfeed kind of ranking of women and perhaps therefore had no ready made answers, and I did not like reporting what was not the case. He fawned over J-Lo, who didn't do much to me, and looking at photos of her now it strikes me that she shares some semblance with him, which evinces that phenomenon whereby people are attracted to those similar to them in general, and in appearance in particular. And the gap can get narrower when the couples are same sex. We all have seen an ambulating group of friends who on the surface were but variations of each other. There were two Bard math professors who many assumed shared a family name because they were siblings, while in fact they were married.
Could my sense of shame about sexual drives and attraction really have emanated from shyness? As I ponder about it the answer seems to hang on another, to the question “what is shyness?” Instead I step back and speculate that it emerged from three factors. One, a prevailing sense of uncertainty and doubt, which makes me question everything (in my childhood my father often called me спорщик, perhaps “disputer”), take long to make decisions and, as this attitude gets directed not only at the world but reflexively too, feel diffident. Two, a careful observation of accepted principles. It's for this reason that I assume a pedantic approach, as will be demonstrated soon, towards incongruent or problematic maxims which others seem to off-handedly champion. I feel uneasy claiming one thing and enacting another. Perhaps that, too, has to do with shyness, with the fear of being rebuked by others, for being phony. Together with the sense of doubt it engenders a lack of spontaneity, since habits are entrenched as the right way to lead my life, while the potential rise to happenstance is imbued with uncertainty. And three, the general Western view, originating I believe in the Aryan dualistic religions and propagating through its adoptive Christianity, that the mind was good and the body was bad. Growing up there was nothing at home or at school that explicitly spoke against the body, but there was a promotion of the ‘life of the mind’ to the implicit exclusion of the ‘life of the body.’ It was not merely that eating and sex were placed beneath listening to Mozart and reading Shakespeare in the order of life's pleasures, but that the body was regarded as almost incidental to the person, but that's another topic. I should say however that there was no active oppression. I would be shocked to hear stories all around me from my US native peers in college. A particularly memorable one was about a neighbor who called one's parents with concern after seeing him kissing on their street. In contrast I recall a time I came back home from a party with Adva. It was not the first time she visited, and my father had once opened the bedroom door on us not quite fully dressed, a mistake he would not repeat, but this time she was brought home late at night. In the living room through which I scurried with embarrassment my father asked me if I was not too young —I was 15— to which I mumbled in reply and vanished. I wonder now if oppression does not have an ironic effect, by prompting its target to become aware of itself and its defiant validity.2 A theory of an important teacher I had during high-school was that we become not what our parents told us to, but what they implicitly hoped for us. A just so story, but who knows.
Has the first two combined with the third to produce my kind of shame, an adherence to the idea that the sexual drive was bad and that its expression was an insult? It has felt vain, reckless and laughable to hit on somebody I did not yet know merely because they smiled or seemed morose in a winsome way, but to make a move towards a friend felt like a betrayal of the friendship. And so, too, anything in between — there has been no circumstance where it felt proper to do.
This inadequacy was most manifest in my dealings with Gwen.
Renowned enough to have Wikipedia articles about it. The English article contains some interesting stories, including one about the stereotypical Russian professor who works as a security guard. I immediately recall one Israeli short-story writer Leonid Pekarovsky who had curated exhibitions and wrote art critique in Kyiv, then worked in Israel as a gardener, as a grave-digger and finally (as far as we know) as a parking lot watch.]z
To say nothing of those sought after activities which constitute victimless crimes, be it sex of any kind, prostitution included, or drug consumption, whose prohibition gives rise to dangerous behaviours and practices, as horrendous as human-trafficking, on the one hand, and lays fertile foundations for organized-crime to prosper on on the other. It doesn't even have to be legally prohibited. To the original point, I have never heard of teenage pregnancies in Israel, while in the US everyone seemed to know somebody who knew somebody.