Sex, Drugs & Gefilte Fish by Shana Liebman

Author:Shana Liebman [LIEBMAN, SHANA]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: HUM003000
ISBN: 9780446558822
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-10-26T04:00:00+00:00

Freaking

By Jordan Carlos

MICHAEL ROTH WAS A YOUNG JEWISH PRINCE. His family owned a line of elite department stores in Texas called Roth-Harris, which for a time even trumped its Dallas rival, Neiman Marcus. In other words, Michael had tasted and seen things I as a kid could only dream about—Europe, skiing, tropical beaches.

Michael was a good kid but he was also a total spaz. In peewee league sports, he was always assigned positions where his spaziness could be reined in. In baseball, he played catcher: He never could catch a pitch but he wasn’t afraid to charge. In soccer he was a ruthless fullback, taking the scalps of third and fourth-grade forwards foolhardy enough to advance the ball beyond midfield.

Michael was also one of the most popular kids in school. He had a cool older brother and sister who lorded over the high school and drove expensive foreign cars. His house was nestled in Preston Hollow, an exclusive neighborhood with well-manicured hedges, which was also home to another classmate, Amy Boone—a direct descendant of Daniel Boone, whose parents owned the neurotics’ pleasure garden, the Container Store. T.I. titan Ross Perot lived minutes away.

The Roths’ postmodern pile sat across from a creek. You had to drive across a small cement bridge to get to it. I had looked through my parents’ book of Frank Lloyd Wright architecture and I was sure that the Roths lived in one of Wright’s creations. Mrs. Roth was beautiful. She had delicate, sinewy features, and was going gray gracefully. One of her front teeth had a slight crook, which gave her the most wonderful lisp. OK, she was a MILF.

I know all this because one glorious day Michael invited me to spend the night at his house. Now, whenever I spent the night at a friend’s house, it always seemed to be the same horrible nightmare. My friend would become unhinged over some small thing his mother asked him to do, like put his Legos away, and he would lash out at her. I would shrink into the corner and hope for an end to the madness. My mom would have never tolerated such craziness in her house. My parents believed that order was far more important than the hide of one child. And Michael’s house was no different. He was a brat, used to getting his way.

After that one evening at the Roths’, where we dined on gourmet food and I took a bath so hot it burned my brain, I never spent the night again. Michael and I sort of drifted apart. He was very popular after all and I just wasn’t. I see now that many of my sleepover invites had a lot to do with me being the only black kid in the class. I think the mothers were trying to broaden their young son’s horizons. I can just see the parents saying to one another, “We can’t not invite the black kid.” So I was hardly surprised when I was invited to Michael’s Bar Mitzvah, even though we hadn’t really hung out since we were kids.

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