Confession of a JAP

I learned about my identity when I was six years old. A boy pointed at me: "You are a JAP!" We were next to the wooden playground tower with the orange roof. The snow had have melted so that all the dirt on the surface condensed together. Another little boy with payot and a kippah looked up at me, the green snot running down his nose. I felt the burn on my cheeks of being labeled something that I didn't like and not knowing what it was. I stood in silence staring. That's still my conflict response today. The boy with the payot went back to kicking the snow and working some imaginary problem that only a kid's fantasy knows.

At home, I told my dad what I had been called with a defiant tone in my voice. I wanted my dad to get the boy in trouble. We were in our family home in Forrest Hills, everything I had ever known. Living so far out in Queens, we could afford to have the space for a big round table so that all my four siblings could sit around it. With so many kids, there was a constant chaos. And my dad was constant stillness, wisdom, and love. My siblings itched to get up from dinner and go play with the million Lego bricks strewn over the living room floor. I looked at my father in earnest. "Jose called me a JAP!" I cried out.

"Well," he addressed me with a smitten smile of a Jewish man about to explain a technicality that is sure to infuriate the recipient both for its claim as well its hair brained logic. "You are a Jewish American Princess!" He paused for a moment and added with happiness and bliss, "You are my Jewish American princess. I love you so much." Seeing my face turn red with anger, he tried to soothe me, "Look I can't ever say no when you want something. You have the finest bedding any girl could want. I've got you not one but seven Barbie's, one for every day of the week. There is not a single evening that passes without me reading you a good night story. You are my and your mother's princess!"

He thought it was something special when I could feel that Jose saw something else in it. My dad wouldn't want to get it. So I looked in the mirror for a long time that evening. I noticed my red hair. I noticed the freckles around my nose. I noticed the matte shine on my skin. I noticed the little extra roundness in my jaw. Little by little I could sense a similarity to my siblings and all the other kids that lived on my block. We lived in a heavily Jewish block. Everyone went to synagogue on Saturday together. Jose and some of the kids that came for his part of town had something different that I couldn't put a finger on. We even smelled differently.

With six years old, my mind had developed a new ability. I could tell the difference. I could sense that the world that was normal to me like the candles for Friday night dinner wasn't the world that other kids lived in. I learned that beyond the fringes of my part of Forrest Hills, life was very different. And I got the increasing awareness of just how much existed in the beyond. I was silent about it. I didn't tell anyone. I kept going to the same dinners. The same mini-vans drove me to visit other families. But on the inside I had separated. Once exposed to the knowledge that there is more, I could never go back to the blissful oneness of holding hands and dancing in a circle.

Of course, I did well in school. My father watched over my homework carefully. When I struggled with physics, he had the Jewish boy next door tutor me. I went on to study biology at Columbia. Columbia was a long E train ride away. Seeing Manhattan every day exposed me to the larger world. Columbia has a big Jewish contingent. I stuck with my Jewish friends from my neighborhood. My world wasn't everything anymore, but I still lived in the bubble. When I learned about startling truth, I kept them to myself in silence.

Dorothy was a young English literature professor from Lisbon. Being an ESL speaker and language professor meant that she was insanely good with language because she had to learn it from the ground up and own language obsession would let her rise to PhD level in it. She also had the free spirited and way too comfortable with life streak of Europeans. Her sense of liberty rankled many students and faculty. Particularly, her remedial sessions for the students that dropped to lower grades were infamous for the establishment rattling liberties that she let out. It was something about a belief to awake our passions rather than to simply fill in the missing knowledge.

I had fallen behind in her class. One sullen afternoon where the light barely reached through the clouds yet no rain appeared either, she had us read Anais Nin - "A Spy In The House Of Love". A woman had walked the city and grabbed a pay phone in a random bar. She called a man who turned out to be an interrogator. Haltingly, she would answer his questions. She refused him at first, but he told her that she wanted her truth to come out or she wouldn't have called him.

The concept of an interrogator and calling someone to be questioned was absurd to me. However, I very quickly felt that feeling of the young woman inside of myself. I too wanted to me known. I too wanted to have my darkest, deepest secrets probed. I too yearned a dark figure to concentrate on digging deeper and deeper without any judgement but 100% drive to dig into the deepest shadows: No time to judge, simply dig, dig, and dig deeper into the core of me.

I spent days and weeks when I was on the E train or the silent girl in my Jewish girl clique imagining questions. I wanted to be asked about my puffy, pink rosebud nipples. I wanted to be asked about that random brush of someone pushing past me that sent tingles over my buddy. I wanted to be asked which of the boys and which of his body parts caught my eyes in class when my mind wandered. I wanted to be asked about how I imagined my mom and dad having sex - those two impossibly different people to be that merged and the two most responsible people who put everyone else first succumbed to their own lust. And when I painted the questions and the intent stare of the interrogator - he'd catch every sideway glance, every slightest omission, and would not let me get away with it, then I'd feel a warmth spread in my body and a moistness in my sex. That moistness spreading felt so good, so delicious, so much happiness. And with hunger, I'd probe an even more intimate question at me. If I had to make out with a girl, which would I choose? And my eyes sheepishly looked around the circle of my friends, where I was sitting silently.

I was quiet. I was in a world of my own. We were sitting in a steam room of the Four Season Hotel in Midtown. We were doing a test run for a bachelorette party. We wanted to make sure that the steam room was up to snuff. With rooms starting at one thousand dollars, you can imagine the cost for the parents to throw that bachelorette party, let alone sample everything first. But that's the world that I lived in - Jewish American princesses.

The other part was that we were all wearing coordinated baby blue satin one piece swimsuits and had a towel wrapped around our hips on top of that. The idea of seeing half a butt cheek naked was very improper. We all held our chests a little higher than the other women in the steam room because we were better, perhaps because we needed to feel better about ourselves. We had a constant worry about being looked at wrong or slighted.

Most Americans simply slung a towel around their torso to cover up. But some like the two young black women on the highest stairs sat on top of their towels. They reclined back to show their perfectly round grapefruit sized artificial breasts openly. Their dark chocolate rich skin was covered with rivulets of sweat. Even their legs were parted in a relaxed way. If one were to pass them one could look right at their pussy.

Of course the interrogator asked me: "Would you lick their pussies?"

"I'm curious," I stammered afraid to say it out loud, the burn of curiosity that I felt.

"Which one would you choose?" he tail dove the next question without giving me any pause to capture my composure or prepare my next response.

"What do you think her pussy tastes like? I want to know your imagination!" he relentlessly questioned me.

My girlfriends were discussing how well the shade of blue of the swimsuit went with the color palate of the stone walls in the room. They got into an argument that a single color was too simply and boring. The other camp said that the simplicity was elegant and classy. I was forced to speak as the tie breaker. I told them that I thought blue was a boy color. Then a big fight broke out. I was called old fashioned. Someone else defended me as my thought being her thought from the beginning. It wasn't a mean fight but one of these long Jewish debates to get to the bottom of something.

I listened to the two black women talk about a den of iniquity. On the far west side of midtown, a block away from the Hudson River was a place where sex was sold. No pimp controlled it. Everyone going in man and woman had to pay $80 admission. That's all the money the organizers took. Then it was up to the women to negotiate sex and services with men. They got to keep everything. All the services were rendered in the darkness of the bare lit room for safety. They talked about the thousands of dollars they made every night. They talked about tricks they used to get the guys to fork over hundreds of more dollars. They were apparently from a poor family but spending money by the fist on Dior and every spa they could find. They were different. Now that I knew, I looked closer. They were young ghetto gilded in the finest. They worked out with the best trainers of the city. Their bodies were amazingly toned. Their hair was styled expensively.

The interrogator asked me for the address of that den of iniquity. The heat in my sex was so strong. It made me tingle all over. I started feeling numb as I let the tingles move over me. When my girlfriends got up to leave, I told them that I needed a little extra. I needed a lot extra. Even after the black girls left, I kept repeating slowly 557 W 45th Street. Each time, a ripple of goose bumps would start at my throat, run down my chest, spread in my hips, and finally wrap around my butt cheeks. I'm sure that heat of the steam room helped. My fantasy, not of a particular image or scene, but the feeling of a room filled of sex aroused me.

Nobody in my family or friend circle ever talked about sex or intimacy. Those were inappropriate topics. Dating was a treacherous terrain. Usually everyone knew that you had a crush on someone before you even felt certain yourself. And if you were holding hands, you could be as far away as Coney Island, but someone connected to the community would always see you. And the gossip was the hottest community that would spread. A few were very active and despite secret had a reputation that stuck. Others like me simply withdraw and didn't dabble in anything with boys. In fact a lot of relationships were arranged by mothers. That way any hanky panky would only happen long after their mothers had nagged and fuzzed them into a committed relationship.

That's what made the den of iniquity so appealing. It would be away from any prying Jewish eyes. And so I had to search out for that place. Thursday after Thanksgiving, I called from the door that I was going to get some pierogi at the late night dinner. They shouldn't wait up on me. I was taking my study books with me and might get lost in biology. But in reality, there was a second outfit and a towel in my book back. I didn't know if I had to clean myself up after.

The subway station was empty except for an old black man with piles of old clothes on him sitting way down the track on a bench. The train rattled in with car after car having only one or two people sprinkled in. I was left alone to my thoughts while the train car shook over old tracks and the eerie sounds of the steel wheels echoed. The interrogator wasn't there. I felt to awake to my surroundings to be deeply pulled into myself. I could feel the cool of the night. I could feel the loneliness of a big city. I saw the lights flickering of the windows of a train passing into the opposite directions. I could feel the cool late fall air on my skin. What made me so keen of my senses was that I was stepping into new territory. With aliveness, I had to sense and feel where I was going.

When I stepped above ground, the street was entirely empty. Paper and other light trash was gliding slowly in the wind down the street. There was a blackness to the night. Even though there is always so much light pollution that it's easy to see the sidewalk. I stepped forward into the coldness with my winter clothes tugged tight. It was a few blocks of walking, enough time for the heat in my body to generate.

With a ding-ding-ding, I stepped into a corner bodega. The shelves and products looked decades old. The color had worn off. Even the lighting was yellow and low. The cashier was high up behind a counter covered by bullet proof glass with a small window slipped open. He was talking on his phone, one of those endless conversations where bodega cashiers are seemingly connected for hours and without any explanation to the other party start talking to customers.

"Maple Strauss vanilla flavored yogurt, please," I told the man. He looked like your typical bodega operator, dark face, hair overgrown, stuff clothes.

"Yeah, yeah, go to the back. Someone will get you!" he waved me to go into the depth of the bodega. He went back to talking on the phone in a language that I didn't know.

I had to walk sideways with my backpack at my side. The aisles were stuffed that sick. I passed the fridge with the beer and ice. All the way in the back were big gallon milk jugs with pink labels of an unknown brand. This was probably the broom closet in the old days. I looked up at the round bubble under the ceiling. It was the security camera. I made sure that my face was clearly visible. I could not see the actual camera behind the black glass and where it was actually pointing.

The door rang. The voice of a white man in his forties asked for the same yogurt. A minute later, I saw his face. He was cleanly shaven. He was dressed in a suit with an overcoat. The tie was blue and white stripes. He looked like a midtown office worker. He looked dressy and lonely at the same time. Maybe, it wasn't loneliness but more a distance - perhaps a discomfort with people, a fear to open up that wouldn't let him make friends.

The next person that came was a Latina with a big butt and a short rubbery skirt. She was wearing boots that slipped up all the way over her knee. The boot shaft felt less like boot and more like a legging. She had giant eye lashes and big golden hoop earrings. She was carrying a giant purse that was more beach bag than discreet wallet and phone holder.

I felt a little awkward. I started getting doubts. We were all standing in the back of the bodega. We avoided eye contact and talking to each other. We had to shuffle a little bit to let the next person step in front of the camera to allow face check. At this point, we had to wait for a bit. I felt impatience. Not knowing when we'd get picked up, I realized that I didn't know what I was getting into. Any one of the persons standing around me wasn't anyone I usually interacted with. I felt foreign. I felt like nobody in here would have my back. I felt scared about what it said about me. I always felt my identity of being that of a JAP. Now I was among different people. I was in a new herd. I was slipping into a new identity. It was the first time that I slipped into a new identity. What was it? Sex starved, hungry fiends? Borderline criminals?

My eyes ran over the condensed milk cans, the careless kitten litter bags on the ground, and the scuffed city shoes of the people standing around me. The silence and avoidance despite being so close together was deafening. Then the door burst open with more speed. The steps coming down the aisle were swift and fast like danger or more likely someone who knew the place in and out. A guy in his thirties with his hair slicked back by way too much product and a leather jacket with gold studs clapped his hands.

"The street is clear. Let's go quickly!" he had a Latin accent. There was something Miami nightclub slick about him. He flashed red socks under his other way black outfit. As quickly as he rushed in, he rushed out. The Latina with the over the knee boots rushed fast to get after him. She was struggling to walk her fastest. She didn't usually walk fast. A fragile eagerness showed in just how much she was swaying in those boots to keep up, but never did she waver to give her fastest speed. The men with the suit overtook her the moment they got in front of the cashier because there was a little extra space. We were a calico group hobbling as fast as we could after the men with the red socks.

He took us down the street into what felt more abandoned. And then there was a little square - only enough for a park bench. Up and down the street, there wasn't a single person in the cold night. Then he took us down a flight of stairs to a metal door. He knocked on it. A heavyset man with a big coat opened the door and whisked us to come in quickly. He pushed the last person in to close the door.

I stood in near darkness pressed against the group of people I had come with. We were in a space about two by two yard large. There was a curtain on the other end. Beyond the curtain, there was barely any light, but I could make out there being enough light to get oriented. I could hear the sounds and movements of five dozen people. The bouncer flicked a tiny flash light to count the eighty dollars from the Latina. He also took my eighty dollars and released me through the curtain.

I stepped into the den of iniquity. I immediately heard the unmistaken sound of human flash flapping against each other at a fast pace. I first smelled the luxurious scent of eau de cologne before I picked up the finer notes of human sweat and sex. There was a bar counter with bottles lit up by color lights behind them. The men and women at the bar were standing in silence. The small round tables in front of the bar had two chairs to each. Some were single occupied. Some had a man and a woman talking. Beyond that front entrance was the backside of the room completely in darkness from my vantage point. There wasn't a single light back there. I could hear moaning and grunts come from the vail of dark gray.

I looked at the bartender. He was busy pouring a drink. He clearly didn't give a fuck. He wanted to pour drinks fast and make money. There was a free table right at the edge of the tables with the back to the gray veil. I sat down. I guessed at how the den worked. I expected that someone would approach me and proposition me. I sat up with a tall spine. I looked at the people that I could barely make out in the half light. All the conversations were hushed and quiet. They were also short. A man sat down next to a woman. She put her hand on his wrist. He leaned in to whisper into her ear. She nodded. She got up. She walked with her high heels and fedora pulling him by his hand behind her into the dark vail of gray.

I could hear his belt buckle hitting the concrete floor. She snapped his belt to make a whip like sound. There was a lot of ruffling and movement. She moaned a moan that made my bones shudder. It was so true from the depth of her being that it touched the depth of my being. The gasp was so deeply felt by her. And the interrogator immediately jumped onto my shoulder: "Will you feel that sensation as well? Is that what you were craving? Is that what drove you hear into the underworld?"

Despite my nervousness, I felt light moisture spreading in my sex. I heard the panting both from her, him, and a dozen more people. It was so raw, so real, and so infectious. I felt myself surrendered. I felt my crossing thought that heavy metal door, I had locked myself in here to be surrendered to what would happen to be tossed around in the currents of an unknown river that would pull me deeper into mystery. Mystery, that felt right. I had come here to taste the mystery that I had gotten the faintest sense of ever since I opened the first page of Anais Nin.