Free The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green by Joshua Braff Page A

the Lord!”
    “Yeaaaah,” says Gabriel, and claps his sticky hands.

II
1980
Thirteen Years Old

    With the textured tradition of his ancestors
and with the great and overflowing pride of his parents,
Jacob Philip Green will be called to the Torah
to become a Bar Mitzvah.
    Please share with us in our unfettered delight
as we celebrate the manhood of our beautiful
blond boy. November the first,
nineteen hundred and eighty at nine o’clock.
Temple Beth Tikvah
in Piedmont, New Jersey.

Meg
    Three years later and just like that, my brother is finished with me. He’s done sharing his time, his porn, his tunes, his angst, his friends, his room, and his filthy language with me. I can hear his music every day from outside his locked bedroom door. The Boomtown Rats, UFO, the Surf Punks, Squeeze, the Plasmatics, Missing Persons, Jethro Tull, the Cars, Devo, Sex Pistols, AC/DC, Judas Priest, and a fat and sweaty rocker named Meatloaf. I get glimpses of him. “Sightings” are what I call them. Running down the stairs, kneeling into the refrigerator, hunkering down behind a tall box of Lucky Charms with shoulders slumped, slurping like a banshee. I sometimes see him with all his skate-punk friends or this girl he likes who my father calls a shiksa. Her name is Brigitte andAsher’s friend Nicky tells me, “She’s a slutty Catholic chick that can suck the chrome off a trailer hitch.” When I ask Jonny what the hell this means he says, “A slut is a hooker and a hooker’s a whore.” Asher keeps her as far from the family as possible.
    Rule Number 6 of the Green House Rules
    As it states in the Torah, Deuteronomy 7:1–5, “You shall not intermarry with any Hittittes, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, or Jebisites. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your children away from me in order to worship other gods—and the Lord’s anger will blaze forth against you and he will promptly wipe you out.”
    a. What’s a Girgashite? (Just don’t date Gentiles.)
    b. Don’t date what? (Goyim, non-Jews.)
    c. Why? (Because you’re a Jew and Jews should not marry non-Jews.)
    d. Why not? (Because love, on it’s own, is never enough.)
    e. It’s not? (No.)
    f. Was Mom a Girgashite? (Your mother was Protestant but she was always searching for more.)
    g. More what? (More faith.)
    h. Did she find it? (Of course. Faith is the only thing more durable than love. It’s a massive and complex concoction of shared vision, common values, the awareness of one’s rooted history, and perhaps most important, love itself. But love cannot do it alone. It cannot. The road is too long. What an all-Jewish union provides is tantamount to the foundation of a healthy, lifelong marriage and the offspring it produces. Dating non-Jews is simply bad practice and
often leads to the diluting of our ever-dispersing religion. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?)
    i. Yeah. Dad? (What?)
    j. What’s a trailer hitch?
    Brigitte’s sensual and curvy and Nordic-like with big Jersey hair and very high cheekbones. Like Asher, she fits into the bohemian/skater/metal crowd, but because she worships Black Flag and wears knee-high combat boots she can also mingle with the punkers and the marginally insane. I always come out of my room when I hear her voice and then pretend I didn’t know she was there. She smiles as she passes me and stops, hands on knees, as if she’s spotted something furry in the brush. Asher tells her to ignore it, to keep away; he wings a rock at it. He then grabs her by the elbow and into his room—the mecca of all that’s hip and retro and evil and artistic and dangerous and sexy and dark and zebra-skinned. And the only place in the world I want to be. It’s where he paints, hides, broods, reads up on the great anarchists of our time, and humps this forbidden girl from Hayward through the floorboards. I blow-dry wings into my hair, listen to Journey, pretend I