don’t look back in anger

IT WASN’T EASY being an Indian kid on the East End in the Nineties. Of course, it had never been easy being an Indian kid, and probably harder in the 1690s or the 1890s. Those were arguably far more difficult times for Indian kids, anywhere in the continental United States. Still, the Nineties were particularly fraught for young Weetoppin. He was starting to mature, to spread his wings, to look beyond the confines of Montauk Highway and the summer powwows.

The world he glimpsed beyond that point didn’t look particularly welcoming.

There were no Indians in the Backstreet Boys, 98 Degrees, or in NSync, for instance, nor were there any Indians in the Spice Girls or even in Destiny’s Child, although he was sure that some of them claimed to be Cherokee. Everybody was Cherokee. There definitely weren’t any Indians on Dawson’s Creek. The invisible people, forgotten, displaced, ignored, peripheral, marginal. People told Weetoppin he didn’t exist. Indians were of the past. Dawson was a self-perpetuating preppy future. Happy blondes in khakis, smiling, replicating, one after the other, coming down the shoot, assembly line style.

As a teenager, Weetoppin both loathed and secretly admired Dawson. He detested and wanted to be him. He copied his style, yet mocked the actor James Van Der Beek to anyone who would listen. He was conflicted.

It was on the bus, wearing an Oasis t-shirt, dark shades, and with his thick black hair done up a la Van Der Beek, that Weetoppin first met Yael Weiss. Her father was an influential but not well-known attorney. He was better known for some of his clients, the entrepreneur Ethan Bryant among them, and it was said that Murray Weiss was the one who later talked Bryant out of getting a divorce after the Clapton Antigua affair. Murray Weiss, attorney, marriage counselor, horse whisperer.

Yet even if his clients were famous, Murray Weiss himself was not famous, if you understand what I am getting at. He was not your Shapiro, Cochrane, Dershowitz, Kardashian breed of lawyer. That was not Murray. For one, he was not good looking. Not that any of the other big shots were good looking, but Murray knew that he did not look good. He was bald, short. People used to say he looked like Mel Brooks, when people still knew who Mel Brooks was. He liked to keep a low profile, playing things in the shade, behind the scenes. He and his wife Judy would appear at times in Dan’s Papers, such as that time when they gifted a new Torah Scroll to the Hampton Synagogue. That was a glorious day. Rabbi Schneiderman from Westhampton came out. The Blochs, Levys, and Dolbers were there. It was shortly before Judy died. Murray found her. The coroner said that the many injuries on her torso were conclusive. She had fallen down the stairs while Murray was out at Water Mill lunching with Mr. Bryant.

When Weetoppin slid into the bus seat beside Yael it was just a few months after she had lost her mother. Yael was staring out the window at the manicured hedges that lined the road to the high school. Weetoppin was wearing his aforementioned Oasis t-shirt, a pair of cargo shorts, and some newer sandals. As much as he tried to play the role of Dawson, he was still incredibly dark in skin tone. His father may have been a sea captain from Wellfleet, but Weetoppin looked like a Latin version of Dawson. That’s exactly what Yael Weiss said to Weetoppin as he listened to “Champagne Supernova” on the bus. “You look just like Dawson Leery!”

“What was that?” said Weetoppin, removing his sunglasses and headphones.

“I said, you look just like Dawson,” Yael Weiss said again. “Just not blond.”

Weetoppin just shrugged and then smiled. His teeth were incredibly white. “That’s because I’m Jewish.”

“Are you really?”

For Weetoppin, it was a harmless joke. Some Nineties irony. He didn’t even consider it to be a lie. But Weetoppin’s joke that day on the school bus was only the first in what would become a series of lies, then explode into a solar system. Galaxies of lies, measured by high-powered telescopes, described in astronomical terms like red shift, Lagrange points, halo orbits, and so on.

Yael Weiss, dressed in her favorite beige blouse, tufts of vaguely Middle Eastern hair glowing in the Long Island September sunshine, so that it resembled one of those apocalyptic California nighttime brush fires. Yael Weiss, she of the inquisitive dark eyes, almost chocolate brown, skin of a smooth, latte hue, smelling of dew, freshly cut grass, fields of lavender, soap, shampoo, sea salt, and and the aroma of an especially warm heart, not to mention hot sex, took a liking to our Weetoppin that day. He was perfect.

The trouble with lying to someone, especially someone you care about, perhaps even someone you love and want to love you back badly, is that after a while, you start to believe in the lies yourself. That isn’t to say that you do not know that they aren’t true, no, you always are able to recall their lack of truthfulness, but you nonetheless believe in them, the same way you believe in anything. You hope so much that the lies are true that they gain an air of truth, a kind of shiny, impenetrable, silvery veneer of truthfulness. They seem truer than the things that actually are true. Weetoppin, then called Sean Dennis, had never even thought of himself as being Jewish. He knew little about being Jewish. He didn’t know Yom Kippur from Rosh Hashanah. Yet being Jewish opened doors for Weetoppin. He was invited to family events. He forced himself to enjoy bagels with lax. Strange words orbited him now. Talmud. Midrash. Zohar? These people claimed it wasn’t even the real year. They said it was 5759. Maybe it was? He tried to like unleavened cakes. They weren’t so bad, he thought. Just tasted a little different.

You can imagine how Weetoppin felt one day when, while Yael and her sister Hava were refreshing themselves in the Weiss family’s mansion on Captains Neck Lane, which happened to be directly across from the Shinnecock Indian Reservation, Murray sat beside Weetoppin at the kitchen counter before heading out for a discrete lunch with Bryant. He said, “Son, you know I really do like you.”

“You do?” said Weetoppin, somehow surprised by this. He had managed to perpetuate the lie of Jewishness so thoroughly that he had come to speak little with Murray and to let Murray do the talking. The less he spoke with Murray, Weetoppin wagered, the less he might sleuth out. They were eating bagels again. Always with the bagels. A paper bag of freshly baked bagels from Murray’s favorite bakery. They even had a special bagel delivery man in the Hamptons. Only the most influential Jewish attorneys knew about the bagel delivery man.

“Of course I do!” Murray glowed. “Yael adores you. You have been a welcome addition to this family, after all we’ve been through. Aw, son, I do like you kid. You’re a real mensch.”

“A real mensch?” Weetoppin chewed his bagel more slowly. He didn’t even know what that word meant. He thought it meant something like, a “member of the brotherhood.” It didn’t sound like a nice word though. Almost like an insult. Wretch. Jerk. Slob. Schmuck. Mensch? “Thanks,” said Weetoppin. “I guess.”

There was something about Weetoppin’s delayed reaction that bothered Murray Weiss. On the way out to The Lobster Pot in Noyack to meet with Bryant he thought about it. Even though the kid had been dating Yael for years now, he had never met his parents. He always asked to be dropped off at a certain house (in reality, a large home across from the reservation, where he did not live) and Murray was never invited inside. Moreover, he had checked with friends at every synagogue on the East End, and nobody had ever heard of a Dennis family. It wasn’t a particularly Jewish sounding name, but if Jon Stewart could be Jewish, and Lenny Bruce, then why not Sean Dennis? Still, nobody knew this kid, Sean Dennis. He was a total enigma. He didn’t say much, ate his bagels quietly. Later that night, when he had arrived back from visiting another local client who was involved in a rather painful dispute with the pirate Ray Bright, and his Central American labor-powered landscaping business, he sat Yael down in the vast kitchen and they had a father and daughter heart-to-heart chat. During this discussion, Murray told her. Sean was a fraud. None of his contacts in the other synagogues knew of him.

“What exactly do you mean, Daddy?”

“He’s not one of us.”

It wasn’t the fact that Weetoppin wasn’t Jewish that brought down his relationship with Yael Weiss. It was that he had lied to her over and over again, during the course of years, presented himself as something he wasn’t. All of that time, she had believed in his lies.

“How can I ever trust you again?” she sobbed through her phone.

“Please, Yael, let me explain!”

She hung up and never returned his calls. He even slipped flowers into the daily bagel deliveries to the Weiss residence but no avail. Weetoppin penned her long apologetic poems. Good poems. Poetic poems. The kinds that were semi-publishable. If you take me back, promised Sean to Yael, I will even convert! She burned the messages. Yael was not to be crossed.

It was just a painful memory now, one Weetoppin, formerly called Sean Dennis, would try to push out of his mind on summer nights in his wigwam in the wilds of the reservation. It was just a short hike from the water body that separated Shinnecock from the estates on Captains Neck. On clear nights, he could even see the glowing lights of Yael’s house. He could hear the celebrations on Jewish New Year. Sometimes, he found himself craving one of Murray’s bagels. What he wouldn’t give for a bagel. Once, he thought he could even see Yael and her lovely bush of brushfire hair. She had grown up, gone to NYU, and married a vineyard owner named Galinski. They specialized in organic kosher wines and owned some vineyards in Napa now. Weetoppin imagined that he loved her. She had forgotten him. For Yael Weiss, he was a distant memory, a faded polaroid, an old Oasis song heard on the radio. Sean Dennis. Yael’s “fake Jewish boyfriend.”