hungry stern came back from a summer in israel, and he was different, and nobody liked it, not a bit. for one, he’d grown a beard, an odd and scraggly thing, an untamed mess that was secretly the envy of the entire teenage block of us, but over which we gave hungry no endless amount of grief. “hey hungry, got some dirt on ya,” and “hey hungry, is that a ferret on your face or what” and so forth. but to each guy, what was the most offensive (and therefore unmentioned) disaster of hungry’s violent facial uprising? the sidelocks. yeah, the sidelocks. our friend hungry left the states a tall, lean, barefaced and clean-cut posterboy for the american schoolyard. he comes back, he’s swarthy. he’s hairy. a jew.
marty krummel was the first of us to really get into it about hungry and it was over the saturday ballgames at the concrete park. hungry stopped coming. we’d gotten used to getting creamed by the black kids all that summer while our big man was away. “we’ll get you next week,” we told them, those smug trash-talkers, “hungry’s coming back and you’ll get jacked in the paint,” we warned them. once he was back in the country, it was obvious we’d permanently lost our power forward. they laughed at us, they curled their fingers by their ears, wiggled them, “oh yeah? the rabbi? gonna get your rabbi to play?” and they high-fived. and they tossed the ball our way, defiant, gleeful at their seemingly infinite winning streak. and marty krummel had reached a limit on his shallow supply of patience.
“hungry takes off, he finds god in the desert, meanwhile, we’ve got no guy over five foot six and our defense goes to hell, and where’s he now?” marty wailed, slamming the ball with such force it bounced a quarter-mile, easy, up into the clear blue september sky, “where’s hungry? at shul. that commie’s at shul.”
i shook my head in disgust. nobody but nobody was even half as offended as me but i did my best to keep my mouth shut because hungry’d been my friend since we got snipped, maybe, since all the way back then. i warned him not to go, those free trips, those recruitment trips to some middle-eastern wasteland, they change you. this is what i told him, the night before he left. and hungry smiled, sadly almost, “i’ve never been anywhere,” like all of a sudden he’s got worldly aspirations, and i punched him, “you’ve been to the cape.” and he claims, “it’s not the same, i’ve never left the country. i’ve never left the state. it’s all the same here. i want to see something.”
i know, i know, i shouldn’t have, but i couldn’t help it. “you want to see something?” i asked, and bent over, and told him “see my ass,” smacking it like he could kiss it if he wanted. i walked away, he left the next morning, the next time i saw him he had three months’ worth of hair on his chin and an interest in yahweh. and my basketball team was for shit.
