Sons of the 613 (7 page)

“I'll wait.”

“No, I'll catch up with you.”

“Okay. Well . . . I'll see you in math.”

I duck into the bathroom, count to ten, peek out the door. Patty is still talking with Kelly. Sarah is gone. No excuses. Here it is. My second chance. I'll just say hello to Kelly and start talking. Just say hello.
One, two, three, go. One, two, three .
.
 . Go. Two, three, go. Go. Go. GO!

Of course I don't.

Maybe tomorrow.

 

“Dude, I can't believe this.”

“Danny, I can't help it! It's my brother!”

“You said you could make it! We're all here again!”

“Isaac,” calls my brother from the other room, “we're not done yet. You've got ten seconds to get off the phone.”

“Danny, can we do it tomorrow?”

Danny talking away from the receiver: “He wants to do it tomorrow.” Groans, catcalls. Steve shouting, “Don't be such a pussy!” in the background.

“Seriously, Isaac, this sucks,” says Danny.

“You think I want to do this? Look, I promise that we can meet tomorrow.”

“For sure?”

“Yes, for sure. I'll go—”

“Ten,” says Josh, hanging up the phone for me.

I got home at three fifteen, and Josh was waiting for me when I came in. He was holding the Xbox.

“Kiss it,” he said.

“Kiss it?”

“Yes. Kiss it goodbye, because this is the last you're seeing it for a while.”

He put the Xbox on the top shelf of his closet, paying no heed to my keening and wailing. Then, equally deaf to my explanations that my friends were expecting me, he sat me down in front of the computer in his bedroom to practice with the cheesy bar mitzvah DVD my parents bought.

Except for the brief phone call from Danny, we've been sitting here for two full hours, surrounded by an audience of Navy SEALs and Marines and Israel Defense Forces commandos who stare at us grimly from the posters that cover the walls. My sister watched for a while, until she got bored and wandered off. I tried to wander off. Josh wasn't having it.

“I want to show you something.”

He rolled up his sleeve to indicate the tattoo on his shoulder, a Jewish star with some Hebrew writing in the middle.

“You know what this says?”

“Kiss me, I'm Catholic?”

“It says six hundred and thirteen. That's the number of commandments there are. You know what it means to be a bar mitzvah?”

“I get a pen from Pop-pop.”

“It means you're a son of the commandments. A son of the six hundred and thirteen.”

I wait.

“Which means you better take this shit seriously, dumbshit.”

Ah.

“Again,” says Josh.

I groan and start hacking my way through my haphtarah for the thirtieth or four hundredth time, Josh reminding me when I forget sections and interrupting to correct my pronunciation. I have to hand it to him; for a guy who nearly flunked out of school, he knows his biblical Hebrew. He can read it for real, not the slow, pulling-teeth, sounding-it-out way that I can.

My parents are not very good Jews. They'll say it themselves.

Mom (serving pork chops): Jesus, we're terrible Jews.

But when I was young they still tried to keep up appearances and raise us correctly. It all fell apart around the time I was eight. It was Passover, when you're not supposed to eat any bread or even have it in the house. Instead you enjoy delicious, wonderful matzo, which is like toasted cardboard, if that cardboard was made with a substance that removed all flavor not only from your mouth but from your memory itself. I walked into the den, and my dad was parked in his favorite chair, eating a bratwurst sandwich. On rye toast. A triple-decker. Pork on bread. It was like opening up his closet and having a dead body fall out. I was horrified.

“What?!” said my dad. “I'm
hungry!
”

And so they stopped pretending. Which is when Josh decided to go in the other direction and do the SuperJew thing: the yarmulke, synagogue every week, keeping kosher, making us light the Sabbath candles. I don't want anyone to know I'm Jewish. Josh wanted every- one to know, so they could make fun of him, and then he could punch their lights out. He even had peyes, the little sidecurls, for a while. It all worked: It drove my parents insane.

Imagine Josh stalking around Jew-free Edina like that, glowering at people.

Imagine now that you are a well-meaning, innocent exchange student from somewhere in rural Germany who had somehow never met a Jew. Excitedly approaching the beyarmulked Josh in the common area of the school, seeing an opportunity to finally unburden yourself of the crushing weight of your country's collective guilt and shame (which, yes, you should share). An opportunity you've been awaiting for your entire sixteen years. Little knowing that your counterpart, a suburban Jew, had likewise never met a real live German and had also been waiting his entire life for such an encounter, but with a very different agenda, one apparently involving a German person and a German-person-size garbage can.

Well done, Josh, my father said later, you've just turned that young man into a Nazi.

From my mother's reports I gathered that she saved Josh from expulsion through some lengthy diplomacy with the school administration and skillful wielding of the phrase “descendant of Holocaust survivors.” Which, by the way, is not true at all—it was the Russians who slaughtered our ancestors.

After a while Josh got tired of being SuperJew—my guess is because he ran out of people stupid enough to tease him for it. But even now when it's time to read the blessings at Passover dinner, we all turn to him.

I finish my haphtarah.

“Jesus,” says Josh, “maybe we can lie, tell them that you're turning twelve so they'll postpone it for a year.”

 

M
ERIT
B
ADGE
: U
NDERAGE
V
ISIT TO
B
AR

I'd been worrying about what I'd have to blacken for my evening meal, but instead Josh stood up and announced that we were having pizza.

He lets me sit with him and Lisa at the table as we eat. He listens with an indulgent smile as Lisa tells him all about her day and what she did and the project she's working on and the book she's reading and about Debbie Frank's new dog, a poodle. He ignores me completely, other than to tell me to clear the table and do the dishes before he gets up and walks off.

 

A little past ten and we're watching
The Ultimate Fighter,
that show where they put a bunch of MMA guys in a house and they beat the crap out of each other.

I once asked Josh if he'd thought about fighting in the UFC. He revealed that he'd actually fought in some local events, lying about his age to get in.

“What?! What happened? How'd you do?”

He'd looked at me, confused, like I'd asked if he was potty trained. “How'd I do? I
won.
”

“So why not do the UFC?”

“I don't know,” he said. “It just sort of takes the
fun
out of it.” He seemed genuinely sad.

At the moment I'm settled into the big overstuffed recliner chair, my overtaxed muscles cramping into rocks. Lisa is asleep in her room. So far Josh hasn't mentioned the tent, and I'm not about to bring it up. The day seems to be drawing to a relatively uneventful end.

Then Josh checks his watch and stands up, turning off the TV with the remote.

“Let's go.”

“What? Go where? To bed?”

“No. We're going. Come on.”

I follow him out to the car, which is parked in the driveway. The night air is chilly, and I pull my jacket tighter.

“Josh, where are we going?”

“Hear some music.”

“Music?”

“A band.”

“Are you serious? What about Lisa?”

“She'll be fine.”

“What if she wakes up and we're gone?”

“I left a note. She has my cell number.” He's climbing into the driver's seat. “Get in.”

“I don't want to hear music, Josh!”

“It's part of the Quest. Get in.”

 

We take the highway toward the city, the skyline growing as we approach.

“Where are we going?”

“Downtown.”

“Downtown Edina?”

He laughs.

“Downtown Minneapolis. A club.”

My anxiety grows. Downtown? The city? I've only been in the city a few times, always during the day. True, Temple Israel is nearby, but we always get there in the protective shell of the car, go straight inside, and return in the car again, all without interacting with any dangerous characters or influences. There are weird people downtown. Things could happen. I feel like he's telling me we're going to Baghdad. I shift uncomfortably in my seat.

“Are you scared?”

“No.”

“Well, stop looking like it.”

We drive on the freeways, cloverleafing from one to the next until we're pointing at the skyscrapers, and then we're leaving the freeways to pull into what looks like a warehouse district, old brick buildings flanking the streets, rising up five or six stories. The upper windows are dark, but here and there on the sidewalk level are restaurants and bars, some with small groups of people standing outside, talking and smoking. It all seems very foreign and wrong and threatening to me.

Josh is steering, looking ahead, but he seems to sense what I'm feeling. “We've got to get you to New York,” he says. “Get you out of Edina.”

“No, no, we really don't.”

“Yeah, we do. Let you see what a real city is like. You're freaked out by this? This is like a toy city. And Edina?” He shakes his head.

He sounds like my parents. They're always telling me that when I go off to college I'll go to the East Coast and understand. When I tell them that I don't want to leave, that I
like
Edina, they give each other a certain look, a look I've come to realize means,
How did we raise a child like this?

In civics we were learning about the immigrant experience, and there was an essay by a woman whose parents were from China. Thirty years they lived in America, she said, and they still never considered it home, always believing that at any moment they would move back to their
real
home.
That's my parents,
I thought.

Josh turns onto a smaller, darker, less trafficked street and parks at the curb.

“I think we should just go home,” I say as he's stepping out of the car. It's the third or fourth time I've said it in about ten minutes. It has the same effect on him as the earlier repetitions: nothing.

“C'mon,” he says.

“No. This is stupid. I'm not going.”

“Okay.”

He shuts his door and walks off. I sit there for a moment and catch sight of myself in the mirror, then sigh in exasperation and climb out of the car and follow him. He's thirty feet away already and holds the key remote over his shoulder and locks the door without looking, not slowing down or turning to see if I'm behind him.

He disappears around the corner and I scurry to catch up, feeling vulnerable outside the bubble of strength and confidence he projects. When I round the corner I get a brief jolt of panic as I search for him, then spot him in the short line of people waiting to get into a club that's halfway down the block.

When I get there he's reached the doorman, a big guy with a shaved head and a leather jacket. They seem to know each other, doing that jock greeting that guys like them do: the soul handshake that turns into a quick off-center embrace, their left hands thumping each other once on the back, their gazes bored and expressionless and focused elsewhere, just in case someone might get the wrong idea that they actually like each other or have any friendliness inside them at all.

Josh registers my presence next to him and says, “Let's go,” and steps through the door ahead of me. I glance at the doorman, who pays no attention to me, his dead-eye gaze already shifted to the next customer in line.

In the vestibule between the double doors I ask Josh how he got in.

“Do you have a fake ID?”

“Don't need a fake ID here,” he says, and opens the next set of doors.

The noise that greets us is so loud, it feels like a physical barrier thumping against my chest. It takes me a bit to organize the distorted sound into parts that resemble music. The room is dark and crowded, people pressed up against the bar and gathered in front of the stage, where the band is tearing through some sort of metal-punk hybrid song.

I hang back as Josh shoulders his way to the bar. I get a few curious glances from people and I quickly look the other way, afraid of eye contact, wishing I were home. Josh reemerges with a beer. I know that he drinks, but this is the first time I've ever really seen him do it, and there's something almost shocking about it. Josh goes right past me, holding his beer just like an adult does, confident and relaxed like it's the most natural thing in the world. I tag along as he makes his way toward the back, wondering if he's forgotten about me entirely. He finds an open spot and stands there facing the stage, sipping the beer, nodding distractedly to the music and scanning the crowd. I plug my ears.

And that's what we do for the next several songs: me standing there grimacing with my fingers jammed in my ears, feeling stupid, Josh totally ignoring me.

After a while I start to get used to the situation, relaxing a bit, maybe even enjoying the music a little. It's not so bad, really. I'm in a club with my older brother, listening to music. Has Danny, Steve, or Paul been to a club like this? No. To be honest, this is sort of cool. Everything will be okay.

And that's when I notice the guy coming straight at me from my right.