locker room talk
all of us different, all of us same
Like most kids at jewish summer camp, I was a weirdo.
Every week, the centerpiece of our ‘maccabiah games,’ a poorly branded jewish version of the summer-long color war, was a sports competition.
Capture the flag, basketball, street hockey. And a few indoor games for the indoor kids.
I always did the indoor games. Chess, monopoly, find the differences between these pictures, whatever.
I also brought a fat binder full of baseball and magic the gathering cards to the beach where we all swam. I’d sit there in the dirt and sell the sandy yet rare cards. I remember banking $48 dollars one week like I was Richie Rich.
I swam, too. For a chubby lil 12 year old, I wasn’t half bad.
Afterwards, we’d all go into some poorly lit, musty enclosure with a wet, sandy floor to change. It was a big space, but we all stuck close to the edges, faces staring down and at the walls, not wanting to see or be seen.
But of course, we’d all look. A peek here, a glance there. You couldn’t not.
That’s when I noticed something odd.
My penis had a hat.
No one else’s penis had a hat, but mine did.
“We didn’t do that in Russia,” my dad tried to explain as I wailed and cried and thrashed about our house that would never be home, given the recent news. We were already strange - my parents had thick Russian accents, they didn’t allow sleepovers, and now, breaking news, their son’s penis had a hat.
“But why?” I begged.
“Ya ne znayoo, Sasha” my dad said, using my soviet name.
fast forward twenty six years
These days, I am a card carrying member of the Young Men’s Christian Association also known as the YMCA.
About a week ago I’m changing there, post-shower, and notice this dude a few lockers down. A regular.
We’re about the same height but he’s way stronger and has a giant black beard shaped like a tombstone, which is also the shape of his upper body.
Combined with his free-flowing pants, the whole thing gives big ‘mediterranean dude from Game of Thrones who’d fight you but also defeat you in a battle of wits’ vibe.
Another dude, who is Indian and has a hairy back like I do, walks to his locker.
Beardman notices and gives him a huge friendly hello in a voice different from what I was expecting.
Not higher, exactly, but warmer. Joyful.
“You’re looking jacked!” he says.
“Yeah, I’ve been trying to work out,” says Hairyback.
“Well, it’s showing. Your nutrition is showing,” says Beardman.
“Yea, trying to do no carbs, no sugar, just a lot of protein and a lot of meal prep.”
“That’s hard dude,” Beardman says back, “so much meal prep.”
And I laugh a little too loud and say, like really say out loud, “I hear that.”
Beardman looks at me and he laughs, thank fucking god.
This is, to put it mildly, huge. We’ve connected, me and the cool guy, and are now…pals? Chums? Buds! We smile at each other like friends do and I go back to getting dressed.
Meal prep, ugh, it takes so much time, yes I hear that! I feel it, every day, even though my wife makes most of our meals.
Wives, am I right fellas?!
No but I do love her so much, the one to whom I am wed.
Been working more lately, so she does more of the food stuffs but we're actually pretty progressive, all in all, and that's not even because we use the same insurance, progressive, I mean - hey how do you feel about insurance?
Is it a scam or what?
Of course I have it, for both my car and the medical life of everyone I love, though if you ask me maybe the car's the more important one!
Do you like engines?
I do not say all this, nor do I think it. I don't need to. It's been culturally imprinted upon my person so deeply that to think it would be a waste. I know it. I am it and I feel it, or feel its lack, always. Everywhere is further proof that I am different, strange, the only dude wearing a hat in a room full of bald guys.
I do next what I often do when worried about how someone else feels about me - nothing. I just stand there, facing the locker, like an animal pretending to be dead, and test them.
Let's see who the other person really is, I say, preparing and perhaps even wanting them to ignore me, proving my worst fears true.
He walks by me and says, actually really says, "Have a good day man," and - AND! - gives my back a friendly and gentle boop with his towel, like they do in the movies with the whipping slap gesture except with the total opposite intention. If those towel whapows say “nerd!”, this one said “friend.:
I respond, again not of my own volition and definitely not with a phrase I use generally, "you too brother."
Brother!!
The joy I feel in this moment. Elation. Belonging. Simple and true. Finally, I am part of this great menagerie we call life.
I have a brother, here, at the YMCA.
No longer am I forsaken because of my foreskin.
Was I ever?
Or had I just decided it must be so?
Back at camp, no one said anything about me being different. Who has time for that when we’re all too preoccupied with stories of how strange everyone else must think we are.
We spend so much time, early on, playing the ‘how am I different’ game that we never learn about the way more fun version: ‘how are these two things the same?’
These guys, my brothers, they all breathe, they eat food (some healthier than others, shoutout to Hairyback), and they, no, we — we think our little thoughts and fear our little fears until they become gigantic, tombstones that block out the sun-sized sameness of us all, weird little idiots all worried too much about how we’re not enough.
Which is true! We aren’t enough.
We need each other. Sasha, Beardman, Meal Prep, and all the other fellas too. Brothers.
I hear that.
comments
How are you a weird lil guy (this applies to all genders)?
jewish camp - stories?
all other camps - stories?
how are you?
meal prep?
love you for real
HELL YEAH BROTHER. Loved this one.
How do I weird thee? Let me count the ways.
First, I grew up autistic, and undiagnosed. No, worse: misdiagnosed as ADHD, and given Ritalin, which gave me seizures in my sleep, for which in turn I was given barbiturates. "Miraculously" they stopped when they stopped drugging me. My parents also had me tested for deafness because I would routinely not hear them talking to me even in the same room if I was engrossed in something. (One of their responses to my "rudely ignoring" them was to smack me on the head. Anyway.) Because I didn't understand any of the social rules of childhood, I had no friends - or not more than one at a time, anyway. And I particularly remember the teacher who announced to the whole class, at the beginning of the year, that her "project" was to "bring me out of my shell". (No, it didn't work, but thank you for asking.)
Even without the disadvantages of autism I was introverted - people are exhausting - plus all of my peers were so stupid and childish in my view. I always wanted to talk to adults who did not want to talk to me. Not until my late teens did I begin to find it worth talking to anybody my own age. That attitude did not make me popular.
Second, I was the shortest, smallest kid in a school that valued sports, in particular rugby. Even the fat kids were considered useful in rugby. Nor did I understand the unwritten rules of team sports, even if I had been any good. So that in turn earned me a succession of bullies, as well as the derision of a succession of gym teachers. (To this day, I believe that gym teachers are what bullies who peaked in high school aspire to grow up to be.)
Third, I was Jewish-adjacent. My father was unmistakably Ashkenazi in appearance, but we were raised militantly secular. I was aware that my uncle's family were Jewish, and we went to their bar mitzvahs and weddings and so on, but had no idea what any of it meant other than that we were different from the Christians, who were spoken of in mocking terms in my house. And I was the only circumcised boy in my class, something I became aware of around the age of 11 or 12. I spent the rest of my school years either spinning tales for why I couldn't shower after gym, or just avoiding gym entirely.
Fourth, I was a very smart kid, a math prodigy even. (Unfortunately my talent there would peak around the age of 18, and at college I had to switch from math to computer studies because I couldn't manage college-level math.) I didn't even fit in well with the other smart kids, who were all neat and polite and well-mannered and studied hard rather than relying entirely on natural gifts, the products of lower-upper middle class homes whose parents were proud of them rather than weirded out by them. As you have already guessed, that also earned me bullies.
Anyway, thank you for coming to my Ted talk.