Jew Know Who I Am

written by Benyomin Gold-Levine on Tuesday 8th of March 2011
I didn’t always live in Lost Angels. I know that is hard to believe. I am a creature perfectly suited to its environment, like some animal on National Geographic that your plummy G-d denier, Dawkins, might talk about. 

Side note - gotta say, I love that guy. I mean, as a semitic person, my piety extends to mere observation (which may as well be called Jew Voyeuring) to non-practising (a lot of us don’t practice, but we may, to cover our asses for emergencies, rehearse). I believe in Scripture as it’s necessary for business and schmoozing purposes. But when he comes on O’Reilly with that other Limey showoff, Hitchens, and, in that ‘Brit Villain’ voice, rationally explains why religious people are retarded,  man, just watching the aftermath, as the Tea Party goyim splutter and wheeze is a total treat.

Where was I? Oh, yeah – here, cruising PCH1 up to the Palisades, wind in my new hair and a sense that even hedging my bets on the whole ‘covenant with an omnipotent, paternal, MPV deity’ thing has led me to being blessed. Truly. Check me the fuck out.

However, please consider that for nearly every fast talking, charm-laden Jewish exec in the business who swans around the LA/SFV/Malibu triumverate, there’s a homogenous diasporic suburb, back East, missing another nebbish. 

Like Israelis, indigenous Los Angeline Jewry (a very recent evolutionary branch) are a separate species from the what you, the casual anti-semite, might term, a Red Sea Pedestrian. The bookish, pale, neurotic but bright, cynic, with the funny punchlines? East Coast to Mid West, my friend. Woody Allen, The Coens, Larry David, Pee Wee Herman... they came from somewhere else and it was probably somewhere cold. And they stay nebbishy because that’s their stock in trade. That’s a good living, with the idiot schtick.

The rest of us, the boys that keep the show on the road, we don’t have that option. We have to try and ‘fit in’. We get tanned. We watch what we eat. We have personal trainers. We get waxed, fer pete’s sake. Come summer, our grandfathers terrorised the children on the beaches of Colney Island and North Miami. ‘Mommy – there’s an old werewolf, with hair all over his back and big boobies and he’s covered in cheesecake!’

No such fun for us. We have to learn to be cool, because one thing we weren’t in high school, was cool. A cool Jewish kid is like a boditshatva. A mythical being who may touch down to Earth twice in any given millenia. Then, we resent them for not even appearing Jewish and instead being Gwyneth Paltrow or Paul Newman or Will Smith. (Scientologists are the new Jews. Mark my words).

We go on Pick Up Artist’s courses to learn how to ‘game’ women, to be direct and a bit distant and not cry in gratitude when a hot aspiring actress rationalizes that we might have clawed far enough up the greasy pole to actually let our genitalia into her adorable shiksa mouth. Also, not crying or shouting when they blow out our date, cos she has to ‘house sit for my friend in Eagle Rock, who has a Schnauzer, but is there a party you could get me into next week?’ Really. That took a LOT of self control. So all this means that to be a cool, hip muthafukka in this town, means denying a lot of one’s essential being. It means creating a new person from scratch...or at least, going back to Darwin, rationalizing the world in purely kill or be killed terms and hope no one fires a Freudian Analysis Ray at you. Or, if you have to shrink me, wait until I’ve retired, at least.

All this is my way of saying it’s not easy being me. Now, I’m married, a father and a pillar of the Malibu Parent Drug Awareness initiative. (You should see the confiscations drawer. I can’t even pronounce some of the pharma labels). Last week, I was Vikram yoga-ing with a rising, near-A list talent, on the verge of prising him from those pricks at CAA. As I dropped 20 pounds in precious body moisture and near passed out, he was telling me about his much older female lover. A true Cougar. And a household name. You’d be shocked. Meh, maybe you wouldn’t be. 

Anyway, I’m smiling and being a jock about it (I do faux-jock real well), but, maybe it was my brain reaching a critical 106F, I fucked up. I went back to old ‘me’. From nowhere, the erudite East Coast college kid piped up. The schmuck.

‘Oh, this is all very reminiscent of Benjamin Franklin’s treatise called ‘The Old Mistresses’ Apologue’, you know the one he wrote in 1745, when he was editing the satirical paper, Poor Richard’s Almanac, in Philadelphia? (blank face) ‘The one with eight real good reasons why they are better than younger girls...’ (no, nothing) ‘It ends with ‘And 8thly and lastly... they’re so grateful...’? Hilarious... really... it is... very... pertinent... ah...’ He never called me back. And I don’t blame him. I got a hard back, sac, crack the next day. Hey, it’s the nearest I’m gonna get to flagellation. I mean, I ain’t Catholic. Thank the Lord.