yuvi zalkow

“Yuvi? Yuvi? Can you hear me? Are you there? Did it work?”

I could hear him, but I couldn’t seem to respond. I smiled, I know I was smiling, but my eyes were closed and would not open. Through my tube socks, I could feel the pieces of Lego that I was stepping on. I made such a mess of my Lego that every corner of my room had wandering pieces that never made it back to the shoebox.

I was standing against the wall. I was standing in my bedroom. I mostly knew that this was the case. And Donnie’s hands were pressed against my chest. I could feel that heat from his palm, though the heat seemed to come from some kind of fire inside of me.

There was also a part of me that wasn’t in my bedroom, I was floating with the clouds and looking down at our houses, free from everything I wanted to be free from. When I think back on it, the clouds are those clouds from the beginning of the Simpsons, fluffy and cartoony and full of curves, though this moment pre-dates even the first season of the Simpsons by seven years.

Donnie and I were about eleven at the time and he lived across the street from me. Every day after school we played together—at his house, at my house, in the forest, wherever—until we each had to go home for dinner. That day, he had just learned this cool trick of how to make someone black out and we had been trying it on each other all afternoon.

Here were his instructions: First, you bend over with your head hanging upside down for at least three minutes. You should be near the wall so that when you stand up, your back is against the wall. You should stand up faster than hell and hold your breath while the other person presses both their hands as hard as they can against your chest. If things go well, then you go limp within 20 seconds.

“I promise I’ll catch you if you fall over,” he said to me. And when I didn’t respond, he said, “Trust me, you won’t die. I’ll even go first.”

He thought it was skepticism in my eyes, but it wasn’t. I was thinking that this was the coolest thing I’d ever heard anyone tell me. I loved how it went when people blacked out in the movies, the look in their eyes like they just came back from being a different person from a different world. I was thrilled about the idea of having that moment where I’m so lost that I need to say, “Where am I? Who am I?”

We fought over who would go first, but he won -- he argued that it was his idea to do this in the first place and I couldn’t refute that. But I still couldn’t get him to black out as much as I tried pressing on his chest. And then he couldn’t get me to black out. And then I tried it on him again. And so on, until my third time, when I hovered over those Simpsons cloud in my semi-conscious trance.

When I came to, Donnie told me that I was in a trance for a full minute. He said I was smiling this goofy smile like I was dreaming about Nori Takei. Nori was the Japanese girl in my class that I was in love with that year – and for six more years – without ever doing a thing about it.

As a kid, I worried. I felt that I had some secret problem that made me more a fool than anyone else. There was always at least one or two horrible, embarrassing things that kept me up at night. At various times, these worries included the following: too much hair growing out of my armpits, too ticklish to ever have a girlfriend, a tumor in my brain/arm/leg/butt, a crooked penis, a crooked stream of piss, being Jewish around a bunch of beautiful suburban WASPs, an inability to kick a kickball, having skin the color of a Middle Eastern terrorist, and a dumb smile. Each worry sounds ridiculous, but was still good enough to keep me up at night full of shame for the fool that I thought I was. Even though I didn’t excel in school, I was an advanced student when it came to angst. I had the angst of a child, a teenager, and an adult all at the same time.

As Donnie held me in that trance, when I went limp like that, I was completely comfortable floating on those clouds. In real life, I hated flying so bad that my mom would have to jack me up on Benadryl to get me on a plane. But in this state, I was confident that those clouds would hold me, no matter what burdens I carried. For one minute, this trance made my world of armpit hair, crooked penises, and dumb smiles completely disappear.

I let myself slowly fall down to a squatting position and stared at Donnie like he and I were both dead and we were calmly waiting for whatever was to happen next.

“You have GOT to tell me what that felt like.”

I was still smiling and spaced out and had barely said a thing when my mother stormed into the room, claiming that she had been calling for us for five minutes. Apparently, Donnie’s mother was in the car outside, pissed, and waiting for him. And just like that, Donnie was gone, with me still dazed on the floor and my mother looking at me with that what-the-hell-were-you-two-up-to look. I told my mom that we were just playing with Lego, and I picked up some pieces of Lego that were under my butt. “Oof!” she said in her Israeli accent, then she shook her head and left me alone. And slowly, second by second, my world of worries came back. Another item on my list of shames: the shame of my mother’s disappointment.

As I sat there over dinner with my mother and father, listening to them talk about the latest tragedy coming from the Middle East, it was clear to me that there was only one thing to do. And so I started making a mental list of household items that could -- without anyone’s help -- knock me unconscious.