pew and be saved and, hon, you’re the only Jew I know.”
The Jewish woman politely declined.
I don’t remember knowing many Jewish people when I was growing up. The Jewish people in the South really kept to themselves in those days. In my public school the only way we knew who was Jewish was during an annual event called the DDT (Devoted Daughters of the Torah) Candy Sale. I remember we were always surprised at who was lugging around boxes of candy.
“I didn’t know Debra Joy Goldstein was Jewish, did you?”
We grew up with so many misconceptions. One time someone told me the way you can recognize a Jewish woman is that she usually wears socks with her high-heel shoes. What was that about?
After the tragic death of my father, my mother had remarried, and we lived in an affluent area above Chattanooga called Missionary Ridge. There was a wealthy Jewish family in my neighborhood. The mother was a very powerful judge in the Chattanooga judicial system. And she rode a motorcycle to work.
You must understand that this was the early 1960s. We were barely out of the Eisenhower years. In those days, housewives rarely ventured out in anything other than housedresses. To see this grown woman in her daring pantsuit, straddling a motorcycle and flying down the road to work, was shocking.
It gave me the notion as a kid that Jews were a little wacky.
In 1969, I was fourteen years old and all I wanted out of life was to be a hippie. I felt so stuck in those Tennessee hills. It was just after the Summer of Love, the big hippie gathering in San Francisco, considered to be the birth of the movement (or, by many, the death). I’d gotten to know a lot of Jewish kids because they were more progressive than most of the kids in my town, and a lot of them already practiced the hippie ideals I was so desperate to embrace. The Jewish kids were the first hippies I knew. They all hung out at the bird sanctuary and smoked pot. I cannot tell you the crushes I had on those long-haired Jewish boys. You know Jesus was Jewish. And all those boys looked just like the pictures of Jesus we had on the walls at church. How sinful!
I read everything there was to read about the hippie movement. I devoured every word of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion’s collection of essays about California during the 1960s. I especially loved the chapter about the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco. Back then I thought of San Francisco as Mecca. I wanted to run away and live there. I wanted to wear flowers in my hair! I grew my hair as long as my parents would let me and started locking myself in my bedroom, listening to the Grateful Dead.
My mother would yell, “What on earth is that racket?”
“Mom, it’s the Grateful Dead!”
“Well, I’m grateful they’re dead. Now, please cut it down!”
I read Jack Kerouac, too, with a vengeance. I would almost faint when there were slight suggestions that he might have been bisexual. He was so handsome. And if you read On the Road from the viewpoint of a little gay kid in Tennessee, it certainly sounded like Kerouac’s autobiographical narrator had a huge crush on that other guy, his idol Dean Moriarty, whose path he kept crossing. And let’s not forget that Jack Kerouac lived off and on with his mother till the day he died.
Sounds a little suspicious to me!
There were also rumors that Jim Morrison was bisexual. What a looker he was! He was without a doubt the prettiest hippie to ever walk this earth. I would pretend I was the only one who truly understood Jim Morrison. I read all of his poetry (which is basically just drug-induced babble). I pretended I knew what it all meant, even the parts about the dead Indian lying on the road. When Morrison was arrested for indecent exposure, just the very thought of him pulling his penis out of those tight leather pants onstage in Miami made me almost collapse. Oh, what a crush I had on Jim Morrison!
Many years later, in a trashy book about Andy
The Jewish woman politely declined.
I don’t remember knowing many Jewish people when I was growing up. The Jewish people in the South really kept to themselves in those days. In my public school the only way we knew who was Jewish was during an annual event called the DDT (Devoted Daughters of the Torah) Candy Sale. I remember we were always surprised at who was lugging around boxes of candy.
“I didn’t know Debra Joy Goldstein was Jewish, did you?”
We grew up with so many misconceptions. One time someone told me the way you can recognize a Jewish woman is that she usually wears socks with her high-heel shoes. What was that about?
After the tragic death of my father, my mother had remarried, and we lived in an affluent area above Chattanooga called Missionary Ridge. There was a wealthy Jewish family in my neighborhood. The mother was a very powerful judge in the Chattanooga judicial system. And she rode a motorcycle to work.
You must understand that this was the early 1960s. We were barely out of the Eisenhower years. In those days, housewives rarely ventured out in anything other than housedresses. To see this grown woman in her daring pantsuit, straddling a motorcycle and flying down the road to work, was shocking.
It gave me the notion as a kid that Jews were a little wacky.
In 1969, I was fourteen years old and all I wanted out of life was to be a hippie. I felt so stuck in those Tennessee hills. It was just after the Summer of Love, the big hippie gathering in San Francisco, considered to be the birth of the movement (or, by many, the death). I’d gotten to know a lot of Jewish kids because they were more progressive than most of the kids in my town, and a lot of them already practiced the hippie ideals I was so desperate to embrace. The Jewish kids were the first hippies I knew. They all hung out at the bird sanctuary and smoked pot. I cannot tell you the crushes I had on those long-haired Jewish boys. You know Jesus was Jewish. And all those boys looked just like the pictures of Jesus we had on the walls at church. How sinful!
I read everything there was to read about the hippie movement. I devoured every word of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion’s collection of essays about California during the 1960s. I especially loved the chapter about the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco. Back then I thought of San Francisco as Mecca. I wanted to run away and live there. I wanted to wear flowers in my hair! I grew my hair as long as my parents would let me and started locking myself in my bedroom, listening to the Grateful Dead.
My mother would yell, “What on earth is that racket?”
“Mom, it’s the Grateful Dead!”
“Well, I’m grateful they’re dead. Now, please cut it down!”
I read Jack Kerouac, too, with a vengeance. I would almost faint when there were slight suggestions that he might have been bisexual. He was so handsome. And if you read On the Road from the viewpoint of a little gay kid in Tennessee, it certainly sounded like Kerouac’s autobiographical narrator had a huge crush on that other guy, his idol Dean Moriarty, whose path he kept crossing. And let’s not forget that Jack Kerouac lived off and on with his mother till the day he died.
Sounds a little suspicious to me!
There were also rumors that Jim Morrison was bisexual. What a looker he was! He was without a doubt the prettiest hippie to ever walk this earth. I would pretend I was the only one who truly understood Jim Morrison. I read all of his poetry (which is basically just drug-induced babble). I pretended I knew what it all meant, even the parts about the dead Indian lying on the road. When Morrison was arrested for indecent exposure, just the very thought of him pulling his penis out of those tight leather pants onstage in Miami made me almost collapse. Oh, what a crush I had on Jim Morrison!
Many years later, in a trashy book about Andy
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