It’s easy to pretend to forget how many of my salad days were expended in synagogue community rooms, crosslegged, cheeks flushed, loins throbbing as the conspiracy to amass Jewish teens on behalf of a fuck and suck played out with too little supervision to resist. My first relationship was born out of the North American Federation for Temple Youth. And though that high-school-cum-college girlfriend and I never dared claim our “birthright,” I still saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by exceptionalism.
And yes, I remember throw pillows under my buttock, tickling the thick strings of a Spanish guitar, playing bongos in ponchos with redheaded-dreadlocked potheads, whining Bob Dylan drawls, and intoning slam poetical renditions of “Sweet Boy, Gimme Yer Ass” by Allen Ginsberg, hysterically oblivious to how easily our ancestral scapegoating could be weaponized against Palestinians, or otherwise, our ironic guilt heightened by that blind self-possession.
Ginsberg was like us. Distracted by egoistic hedonism of such depths that his brilliance is still eclipsed by the joke of him: “full lipped, wet tongue, eyes open— / animal in the zoo looking out of a skull cage—” on the bus beside Kesey, searching for yagé in absentia of William S. Burroughs, never mind that when I tried to restage the joke some sixty years later and got my Presbyterian wife high on DMT, I inadvertently transported her to her own young adulthood, unlocking traumas not since known beyond dreams.
All this terror dredged up within an heirloom of inheritance. Semites hiding behind genocidal shadows from which we’ve been sheltered. We were indoctrinated with delusions, and today, many of us can’t do anything but reject. Can’t do anything but plainly say no. And another Kaddish, like Ginsberg’s. “Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.” Strange is hardly the word.
-David Fishkind