it’s a mitzvah!

When I was eight days old, some bastard Rabbi – in possession what was surely a highly dubious medical background – was hired to slice off my foreskin while my entire family stood around and watched like a bunch of mooks. Fourteen years later, I began a moderately successful career of drug use that lasted through most of my teenage years. I refuse to accept this as some sort of coincidence.

Now, in all fairness, I wasn’t that into using drugs (though arguably more than I was into circumcision). I talked a big game, though. I mean, everybody needs a cause, right? Well, adjusting for hindsight, mine apparently was to fit as snugly into the politically-informed-and-generally-intelligent-Marilyn-Manson-listener-who-wore-idiotic-pants stereotype as possible. Mission accomplished!

Naturally, this included a rabid defense of drugs (= drug use, drug legalization, drug music (I have to wonder how different my life would be if the soundtrack of the time had been more reliant on Spiritualized than, say, Aphex Twin), drug literature, the aforementioned stupid pants, and black nail polish) to anyone who would listen. Which was, of course, nobody – save my own merry band of quasi-goth travelers and my mom when she was a little sauced.

I was always the poor one, though that hardly mattered. The majority of my friends in high school were varying degrees of disgustingly wealthy, and as a result, there was never really a shortage of illicit substances at hand.

The irony of the situation was that I was too fucking neurotic to enjoy any of the good stuff.

If I sleep funny and wake up with a sore elbow, the leap it takes to convince me that I’ve acquired some sort of bone spur/shrapnel deposit/arm cancer/spider colony overnight is pathetically short. What made people think I’d be able to read that ecstasy drains your spinal fluid/destroys your liver/rapes your grandmother/whatever and then have anything resembling fun while on it? Jesus.

(You want a deterrent in the war on drugs? Send your kids to hang out with the Feldman family down the way for a while. Jewish hypochondria is a powerful tool.)

The exception to this was mushrooms. I loved mushrooms. It’s not like I did them regularly, but when I did … it was an event. Unwise decisions were made. Rambling, incoherent conversations were had (with myself). Bathrooms took hours to get out of. The conventional wisdom about mushrooms leaving black spots on your brain seemed rather inconsequential when I could taste fucking colors, man.

Anyway. The aforementioned rich kids with whom I was friends? They had this thing about being high on something at all times. Every sober moment, it seemed, was a wasted one. Kind of silly to look back on, but at the time, this made perfect sense. (Let it be known, though, that no matter how many joints you smoke beforehand, sneaking into “Freddy Got Fingered” is an awful experience in every possible way.)

Their “high all the time” edict didn’t always sit well with me, though. For example, they insisted on being blitzed all day long at school, which was something I generally avoided; neurosis plus drugs plus authority figures just felt like a waste.

(My mom, again, being the exception. She struck a fine balance between passing along helpful life lessons about drug use and perhaps being a little too permissive on occasion.)

But again … put a bag of mushrooms in the pocket of my 50-inch-leg canvas monstrosities as a 16-year-old, and all of my more sensible mental features would spontaneously disengage. With this in mind, eating an eighth of an ounce of the stuff before a Passover dinner with my family, at the time, was an exercise in the most brilliant kind of logic.

I thought I’d given myself enough time between dosing and dinner that, by the time we arrived, I’d be holding nothing more than a pleasant buzz. Luckily, I didn’t start to peak until I was sitting in my grandparents’ backyard, staring at a weeping willow and looking eight shades of pie-eyed retarded.

No matter though, I thought. How could anyone possibly know? Like any of these people who grew up in the ’70s can spot someone tripping absolute and total balls. Yeah, that’ll be the day. Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s a plank in the fence over there that requires my complete and undivided attention.

People milled around, and I did my best impression of a person who was not entirely out of his league. My stomach turned, my cranium filled with what seemed like helium, and the thought of having to speak to anybody ever again filled me with dread unimaginable.

It was right about then that my uncle, my mom’s brother, came over and, in one fell swoop, solidified this as the weirdest fucking drug trip of my life.

Inexplicably and unprovoked by anything at all, he sat down next to me and leaned in close to tell me something:

“Hey Jordan,” he whispered, “you know what’s buried in [my grandfather’s] tomato garden over there?”

“Gbruuuuuuhhhhnnnngggg?” I said, turning to see that he was pointing at the vegetable patch that I’d eaten delicious produce out of my whole life, and which was about to be ruined as thoroughly as anything has ever been ruined for anybody.

“Your foreskin.”

I’m not exactly sure what my reaction to this was. Had I not been completely off my ass and in the midst of a rather intense mushroom trip, I probably would have found this slightly revelatory and more than a little disturbing. In my impaired state, I can only imagine that a quick-fire succession of horrified noises and distorted faces accompanied whatever sort of spastic bodily movements I began to engage in. Whatever happened, it was enough to attract the attention of my mother, who rushed over to see what the commotion was.

“What did you just tell him?” she asked him.

“Oh, nothing. I just told him that his foreskin is buried in the tomato garden.”

“WHAT? Why did you tell him that?? Fuck!”

Not to beat this fact into the ground or anything, but please bear in mind that I am extraordinarily high on mushrooms that are apparently only getting stronger while this is all going on, inches away from the unbridled goddamn insanity, probably close to tears for a multitude of reasons but really who fucking knows because they’re talking about foreskin and the tomatoes and oh my God I’ve eaten those tomatoes and why the fuck oh Lord we haven’t eaten yet and I’m so high and they’re arguing about my foreskin and and and guhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…

I’m not a betting man, but I’d wager that the odds of a family member choosing the one time you’re rip-roaring stoned on hallucinogenic fungus at a Passover dinner to alert you of the fact that, following your circumcision some one and a half decades prior, the evidence of the crime was disposed of in your grandparents’ backyard, are only slightly higher than those of being struck by lightning that is controlled by an al-Qaeda operative who just won the lottery and who is being struck by fucking lightning.

The best part is that it’s all true. In Judaism, they’re really into making sure that every part of the body is returned to the soil whence it came – foreskin included. Apparently, my family thought it best to keep things close to home. Because Jews are a bunch of sick fucks.

Also, I’m not glossing over my actual reaction to the news – I really have no idea what I could have possibly done. My mom has since passed away and I’d rather drive nails through my hands and feet than broach the subject again with my uncle, so I guess the moment of truth shall forever remain a relative mystery.

But let this be a cautionary tale! Though about what … I’m not exactly sure. Something about drugging your children with high doses of hallucinogens before revealing the whereabouts of various appendages of theirs that have been surgically removed and subsequently buried over the years, I guess. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Man, I can’t wait to have kids.