Jesse, the spoiled brat

10Oct08

Growing up, Jesse got everything she wanted from her father (who hated my goy guts), and as such she demanded the same from the men in her life. She was certainly pretty enough to get away with it.  I took a second job just to please Jesse. I bought her diamonds, spent $400 on meals; flew her to Miami, booked wine tours in Tuscany.  I hosted lavish parties on the Upper East Side for her lame friends.  But it was never enough.

One day, getting out of the shower, I noticed she was frowning as she looked at my body.  She asked me if I would consider circumcision.  10 days and five grand later, I was on an operating table.

When I came out of anesthesia I was totally disoriented.  I grabbed the urologist by his white coat and screamed, “Where the hell did you put it you dirty son of a bitch!?”
“Don’t worry,” he said, “it’s in the basement.”  I’m not sure how that was supposed to make me feel any better.

In some ways it reminded me of getting my wisdom teeth removed, except for it was much more symbolically loaded.  Every time I fell into REM sleep I immediately woke up in pain.  I had to keep a bucket of ice next to the bed.  The words “abject” and “suffering” often came to mind.

But. . .three weeks later, I was good to go, and for a moment, Jesse seemed to be happy with me.  To her, it was as if I was, somehow, closer to complete.

Friends of mine wondered what the hell was wrong with me.  In retrospect, I think I wasn’t in love with Jesse so much as I was her close-knit community and loving infrastructure—things I’d never had before.  And to look at Jesse, there was no doubt that she was one of God’s chosen people

Whatever the case, the afterglow wore off soon thereafter and I found myself selling tax plans in the Empire State Building to pay for her breast augmentation.  Six months later she left me for someone her parents hooked her up with, from a good, independently wealthy family.  She said she thought I knew that she and I could never really be together because of my background.  I offered to convert but she said it just wasn’t the same.  By the time I finished rabbinical school she was already married.  Beaten, I threw in my yamulke, moved to Chiang Mai and got into hard drugs and hookers.

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