A Kosher Dating Odyssey: One Former Texas Baptist's Quest for a Naughty & Nice Jewish Girl (16 page)

Brazil got under my skin. A brief reality mixed with ongoing fantasies to create an interest that deepened over the years, although the relationship with Astral didn’t flourish after the trip.

Music led the way, from the first CDs I bought in Santos to a solid knowledge of bossa nova and the work of other performers: Maria Rita, the late Tim Maia (who combined Solomon Burke-style American soul music with Brazilian beats, to great effect), Robert Frejat, Celso Fonseca, Seu George and many others. I’ve been to the Bossa Nova Brunch at S.O.B.’s in New York and recently heard Gal Costa, a star singer for forty years, at Carnegie Hall. My subscription to the Pandora music service typically tunes in to Brazilian artists; for variety, I’ll listen to mpb.com.br, a station that the Girl from Ipanema recommended. Lately, I’ve been exploring the Brazilian music found on the Spotify online service. Seriously, I listen to more music in Portuguese and Spanish than I do in English. With a dictionary I can translate most of the lyrics.

As an inveterate language nut, I listened to Portuguese tapes and CDs for years. I finally decided to make a bigger commitment, and one summer I took six weeks of intensive Portuguese at Brazil Ahead in New York, four days per week. Despite years of ragged self-study, I could barely keep up with the class, especially the listening part, but I gamely stuck with it and may start again. My favorite learning moments involved, of course, music. The class introduced me to the group Tribalistas, which brought together singers Marisa Monte, Carlinhos Brown and Arnaldo Antunes. I had heard of Monte and Brown, but didn’t know Tribalistas. The teacher played one song, and I was hooked. I had to get that album. I found it, listened to it, loved every cut and could play some of them five times—like the first song, “Carnivalizar,” and “Já Sei Namorar”—without getting tired of them. The album bewitches me with its interplay of voices and musical styles.

On the film front, I’ve worked my way through most of the Brazilian DVDs at the local library. I liked them all, especially
House of Sand, Alice’s House, Bus 174, City of God,
and the TV series
City of Men.
I follow the economics and social issues of the country as best I can from a distance, and keep up with local happenings through the Brazilian newspapers published in the New York area that I can find around the Little Brazil neighborhood on West 46
^th
Street. A friend loaned me the novel
Tieta
, by Jorge Amado, warning me that it was “spicy,” and I read as much as I could before its length exhausted me.

I’ve thought about returning. I’d like to see Rio de Janeiro. My interest remains strong, although no longer tied to Jewish online dating. Still, those online connections—multiple ones, in Brazil and in the U.S.—struck a chord that continues to resonate. Every time I hear “Encontros e Despedidas” and “Carnivalizar” and “Eu Amo Você” (“I Love You” by Tim Maia), images and memories swirl in my mind, some that really happened, others simply unrealized hopes tied to a gamble 5,000 miles away.

So, all that’s left to say is: Obrigado, Astral.

After reading this far, you must be thinking: How did this guy get to be who he is? He’s so—off-kilter in some ways. How far back can his quirkiness be traced? Well, putting aside the First Baptist Church of Mission, Texas, for the moment, let’s talk about the growth of my awareness of the carnal side of life.

I confess: my favorite erotic aroma is chlorine. I can’t resist its siren odor. Chlorine imprinted itself on me as a pre-teen and I never escaped.

I thank Mrs. Walsh for this. Mrs. Walsh held swimming classes every summer at the pool of the Fontana Motor Hotel in Mission. The pool reeked of chlorine, which clung to me and wafted around the whole complex. I could even smell it in the Fontana’s lobby, where I wandered after class.

Ever the curious reader, I checked out the magazines in the lobby’s gift shop. There I found
Playboy
. Golly, I thought, this is a change from
Hot Rod
and
Dave Campbell’s Texas Football.
Even then, I knew an eleven-year-old shouldn’t really be scanning
Playboy
, so I slipped the magazine into another one—male readers know this drill. I flipped through the issue, trying to look nonchalant. But Misses June and July dazzled me with their undraped allure and bubbly smiles.

Case in point: I still swoon for July 1969 cover girl Barbi Benton, AKA Barbara Klein. In the unpainted passageways of my brain, the Fontana’s chlorinic aroma mixed with this vision of Barbi on the beach. A whiff of chlorine returns me to July, 1969—those eyes, those shoulders, Barbi’s brown hair tumbling down her curving waterslide of a back. In a flash I’m back in the Fontana’s lobby, where Mrs. Walsh’s class ended and my introduction to another wet side of life began.

Forty years ago, I had to figure these things out on my own. With no Internet, no cable TV and no older sibling, I had few outlets or role models to answer questions or help me scope out “sexy.” My mother wasn’t much for talking about the changes of adolescence, and my father moved away after they divorced in 1962, playing no role until I was a teen. I couldn’t look to the larger community for guidance. Mission shared the conservative culture of deep south Texas, where you didn’t discuss adolescent sexuality or liberal politics.

That was the surface. Peer beneath, and you’d see that the place throbbed with all the hormonally driven drama of any town. I knew about affairs and busted marriages; forbidden passion in Mission’s grapefruit groves and the teen pregnancies that sometimes resulted; the tears when parents wouldn’t let their kids date a Mexican (or a gringo, as happened to me); big talk about Boystown, the red-light district in Reynosa, Mexico, on the other side of the Rio Grande. I even heard—very quietly—about gays and a reputed gay bar in McAllen, that wicked metropolis east of Mission. The McAllen
Monitor
carried ads for the Rio Grande Valley’s own adult theater, the Capri in Edinburg, which touted itself as “where the elite meet.”

My dear late mother blessed me with her salty and accepting take on life. She would show my brother and me mimeographs of ribald jokes and drawings that circulated at her insurance-agency office. I’ll always treasure her comment upon hearing of the betrothal of an exceptionally prim young woman from the First Baptist Church of Mission. She observed, “Hmmm, I guess she’ll do it by the Book.”

Against this background, I stumbled step by step toward what I liked. Some of the images made a deep impression, as those memories of Fontana afternoons attest. Compared to the visuals available today—Facebook, instant messaging and the hook-up culture—my thrills were mild. But they were mine.

The actual mechanics of sex and bodies embarrassed me. Our pediatrician provided my brother and me with booklets on male and female maturation when I was around ten. Drawings showed the parts and process and where Plug A enters Socket B. I avoided the materials because they forced me to acknowledge what bubbled in my id; I couldn’t see those thoughts as normal. The booklets were about body chemistry, parents making babies and wet-dream reality, not the girls around me and unvoiceable fantasies. I shoved the booklets into the closet under a stack of
Saturday Evening Post
magazines.

I groped through the ways of the world on my own. Insights came from surprising sources. For example, to this day I believe that Tom Sawyer is one of the most suggestive books ever written. Twain expressed my inchoate longings, bubbling up and around me when I noticed the early developing girls at William Jennings Bryan Elementary School.

I quoted
Tom Sawyer
in the
Nassau Herald
, the senior yearbook at Princeton University, where new graduates at age twenty-two sum up their life philosophies. While others turned to Bruce Springsteen and Virginia Woolf, I invoked Mark Twain. The passage I selected involved Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher: “In a little while the two met at the bottom of the lane, and when they reached the school they had it all to themselves. Then they sat together, with a slate before them, and Tom gave Becky the pencil and held her hand in his, guiding it, and so created another surprising house. When the interest in art began to wane, the two fell to talking. Tom was swimming in bliss. He said, ‘Do you love rats?’ ”

I probably read
Tom Sawyer
when I was ten years old, in 1967 or 1968. Re-reading this passage, I can relive exactly what captured my attention. Tom and Becky are alone, they talk, they touch, he’s thrilled at the intimacy, and then he says the wrong thing at the wrong time about old flame Amy Lawrence (boys do tend to stick their foots in their mouths, and girls do like to point this out). Later passages touch on anger, jealousy, complications from other relationships, reconciliation and emotional support in life-threatening difficulties. Far more explicit writings from “adult” novels merely embroider these primal themes.

When Tom and Becky are trapped in a cave, the erotic overtones are darker and more urgent. What will Tom and Becky do in a deadly situation? “Tom kissed her, with a choking sensation in his throat, and made a show of being confident of finding the searchers or an escape from the cave.” Any moonstruck boy can extrapolate the scenario to play the plucky hero earning a kiss.

When you’re ten years old, your mind begins to run riot, but it can only go a certain distance. That distance stretches out as you age. How often as an adult have I acted out Tom’s bravado, vowing, “I’ll save you!” in a mad effort to lead a woman from her dark place and win her love?

Action films had a huge impact at an early age. The rambunctious romantic Tom Sawyer grew into adulthood with new personae, as James Bond, or a zombie destroyer, or a soldier. And a curvaceous all-grown-up Becky Thatcher always brightened the picture. Certain scenes replayed in my mind for decades.

How accurate are my memories? I recently rewatched the movies with adult images that grabbed me. In each case, I remembered how they hit me right where my hormones begged to be hit. First came
Dr. No
, the earliest Bond movie with Ursula Andress as Honey Rider rising from the sea in a bikini. This film came out in 1962 and I must have seen a re-release years later. Andress looked lovely in her bikini, of course, but what really wowed me was the scene of Bond sucking sea-urchin poison out of Honey Rider’s foot.
So that’s what a man does!

Other powerful images appeared in
The Blue Max
and
The Omega Man
. Each movie showed men and women in extraordinary circumstances. The action gave me a rationale for watching the movie, and the erotic parts were the icing on the adolescent cake.

The Blue Max
involved German fliers in World War I. It starred George Peppard and (again) Ursula Andress as his married lover, Countess Kaeti von Klugermann. In my notes from watching the video, I wrote,

The titan among early teen erotica, no question about it, was
The Omega Man
from 1971, with Charlton Heston as the zombie-battling Dr. Robert Neville, cruising post-apocalypse Los Angeles. It featured Neville’s sizzling interracial love affair with another survivor, tough-talking soul sister Lisa, played by Rosalind Cash. Not only did I see plenty of Lisa, but I heard dialogue with sexual bite.
So this is how men and women talk
, I thought in the darkness of Mission’s Border Theater. My breathless notes said,

Images were one thing; translating curiosity into reality was another. That began to happen, by the bye, at Mission Junior High School and its sock hops, along with boy-girl parties. Goodbye piñatas, hello slow-dancing to Chicago’s “Color My World.”

Teen lust and conservative religion mixed together in one head-zapping image. In the summer of 1972, the youth group at the First Baptist Church, which I then attended, welcomed a new member, a girl whose family had just moved to town. Since I once described her as “Venus in jeans,” let’s call her Venus. My very first glance of her struck me dumb: she was fourteen, with curly red hair, in a halter top. A halter top! This was reality: I could actually see her uncovered skin. Countess von Klugermann stepped off the screen and verily was made flesh. This vision of a Baptist chick in a halter top marked the first time that I moved from reading about Tom Sawyer to wanting to act like Tom Sawyer. I yearned to get to know Venus in ways the First Baptist would not officially approve.

Venus and I dated on and off through Mission High School and even beyond. We had our dramas in the hallways, and I bumbled along, more rebuffed than encouraged. The halter-top introduction was the most I ever saw of Venus. I constantly said the wrong thing at the wrong time and got “ragged out” for that, as the local phase went.

While Venus and I veered between mildly making out in my mother’s 1968 Chevy Impala and ignoring each other, movie images changed. I remember the visuals, but also the emotional tones. I was learning that eroticism and sexual longings involve vulnerabilities and feelings, not just rescuing damsels from mutants.