The Instructions (16 page)

HER.” From under subheading 5 (“The Hot Lunch Caveat”) in “Chapter 2: Lunch”
on p. 21 of
Safety and Conduct Manual for the Cage.

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Seeing Botha, Mr. Frazier took off, and that’s when I’d executed my part of 3: I pushed my pass through a diamond-shaped space of the gate.

But then instead of doing his part of 3—checking to see if the pass was acceptable—Botha caulked a trickle. He didn’t even take the pass out of my fingers. He said, “Show me your pass.” He said the same thing every time. I had been at the gate at least a hundred times, and he knew I knew the protocol. Him saying “Show me your pass” was like a mugger holding a gun in your mouth and saying, “You better do what I say because I have a gun in your mouth.” Or if a man behind the counter of a hot-dog stand who just passed you a hot dog said, “Now pay me the money you owe me for that hot dog.” It makes it seem like if you do what the man says, you’ll be doing it because he
says
to, when that’s not true. When you do what the mugger says, you do it because he has a gun. When you pay the hot-dog guy, it’s because you owe money for the hot dog. If the mugger didn’t have a gun, you would not do what he said. If you didn’t owe money for the hot dog, you wouldn’t pay the hot-dog guy. If Botha wasn’t the monitor, or if we weren’t at school, I wouldn’t give him my pass.

When Adonai told Moses to bring water from the rock in the Sinai by speaking to the rock, Moses not only struck the rock instead of talking to it, but he said to the Israelites who were gathered for the miracle, “Listen now, O rebels, shall we bring forth water for you from this rock?” like it was him, Moses, who 148

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would bring forth the water, when it was God who would bring it forth. Even though these were the only wrong actions Moses took in all his life, and even though Moses was understandably upset—he had just come down the mountain only to discover his brothers engaged in acts of idolatry—it was for his having taken these two wrong actions that God never let him inside of Israel.

I wanted to remind Botha of his limitations, but I was not Hashem and Botha was no Moses. There was no promised land for me to lock him in a cave outside of. So I did what is called a Harpo Progression of Defiance. The first step in the progression was that I pulled the pass back out of the diamond-shaped space and dropped it on the floor.

“Pack it up,” Botha said.

Botha was the monitor and I had to do what the monitor said, so I picked the pass up.

Then I dropped it.

“Pack it up and do not drop it,” he said.

I picked it up and I folded it in four. I pushed it through the gate.

“Unfold it,” he said.

I unfolded it. Then I balled it up and threw it at the lockers behind me, then held up my pointer-finger = I’ll be right back, and I ran toward the lockers and picked the pass up and came back to the gate and folded the pass and unfolded it and tore a notch into each corner of it.

He could not ask me to untear a notch.

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So I pushed the pass through the gate. That was the end of the progression.

Harpo Progressions make me laugh because they make both the Harpo and the mark look silly. When the mark doesn’t laugh at the progression, it is a sign of internal robotics, and I think that is even funnier.

Botha didn’t laugh because all he could think about was how stupid he would sound if he sent me to the Office. If he sent me to the Office for doing a progression, I would get a detention, but I always had one anyway, and Botha would look like he was failing at his job as the monitor. The monitor was supposed to know how to run the Cage and the kids inside it. The monitor was not supposed to get played like a straightman.

So he didn’t send me to the Office. He said, “You’re late for Group.”

I’d forgotten about Group. It was Tuesday. I had Group every Tuesday for half an hour before Lunch.

Let me in, then, I said.

He said, “Go around.” He pushed the pass back through the gate.

It would have been faster to go through the Cage; there was a door connecting it directly to Call-Me-Sandy’s office, and if I’d been allowed to enter the Cage, I could have walked a straight line to Group. Since he wouldn’t let me in, I had to walk C-Hall down to 2-Hall, then walk across 2-Hall to B-Hall, and walk up B-Hall for the same amount of steps that I walked down C-Hall 150

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to get to 2-Hall. It would take at least an extra minute to get to Sandy’s B-hall entrance. Botha knew it would, and he made me go around to punish me. He thought that because it was important to him that everyone got everywhere on time, it was important to me to be on time. But it was only important to him. I liked walking in the hallways. Especially by myself. And why would anyone rather go in the Cage?

But what was the most dumont about what Botha did was how he said “You’re late for Group” to me, like it mattered, like it was something to be concerned about, and how then he did the only small robot thing he could to make me even later to Group.

My mom would call this passive-aggressive behavior. PAB. She’d also call certain forms of laughter PAB. She’d say that Harpo Progressions of Defiance were PAB, too, but then she’d laugh when I’d tell her about the progressions I performed at school. So would my dad. They always laughed at the same things. Except Woody Allen. On one of their first dates, they rented
Broadway
Danny Rose
and nearly broke up. Even over a decade later, my dad still shivered when he recalled it. He described the experience as being “a little bit less fun, perhaps, than chain-smoking for ninety minutes while handcuffed to a dowager with asthma who used to teach Health and smells incontinent.”

“What do you think is so funny about this nebach?” my mother would shout from the kitchen whenever my dad and I watched Woody Allen. We would turn down the volume, but she’d come into the living room anyway, then enumerate the qual-151

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ities that made Woody Allen a nebach. He was weak and ugly, defective and ineffective and far less clever than he thought, plus cowering and phlegm-complected and proud of it. Ineffective? I would sometimes ask her. And she would tell me to just stay out of it and not smartperson at her. Woody Allen was her Desormie.

For my dad, though, Woody Allen made the top five, behind Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, ahead of Larry David and Richard Pryor. My dad’s top five was the same as Nakamook’s, and, in both cases, Sacha Baron Cohen was encroaching on either Pryor or David, but he had yet to prove his longevity, and neither my father nor Benji wanted to jinx him by declaiming his genius too early. I told my dad that once at dinner—about him and Benji having the same top five—but he wasn’t impressed. He said, “What about the Beatles? Does he also enjoy the music of the Beatles, your Benji? Does he, like I, your mom, and Charles Manson—”

You’ve never even met him, I said to my dad.

“I don’t need to,” he said.

He’s my best friend, I said.

“You’ll see,” he said. “You’re already outgrowing him.”

The thing about my father was he wasn’t some kind of schmucky condescender who liked to act like he knew you better than you did; he was genuinely worried about my friendship with Benji.

And the thing about Benji was that he
was
my best friend. So I was in this position, this suck position, where if I kept defending Benji my father would only worry more about our friendship, but if I quit defending Benji, then maybe that would mean that my 152

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father was right about our friendship since what kind of best friend doesn’t defend his best friend against his father’s assertions that their friendship is weak? I tried to break my fingers but my fingers wouldn’t break.

My mom said to stop it. She
had
met Benji—a few nights earlier he’d eaten at our house, but my dad was working late at the office—and she liked him too, despite the new strike against him for liking Woody Allen. “This Benji is a loyal friend,” she told my dad. “And also intelligent. Very perceptive.”

She’d asked Benji what he thought of the students in the Cage, and he’d told her, “You don’t have to worry, Mrs. Maccabee.

Gurion’s able to take care of himself, and most kids know that, and the ones who aren’t sure—they know that
I’ll
avenge any offense against his person.” He’d said that with half a mouthful of kufta, and it had sounded less kenobi than it looks written down.

“This is not a bad kind of friend to have, Judah.”

My dad kept his eyes down, sawed at his steak = “I’m dropping this subject.”

So I dropped it also, even though I’d wanted to say more about Benji because they didn’t just share the same top five comedians, he and my father, but both cited the same Woody Allen
scene
as their favorite (the one in
Annie Hall
where Alvie gets arrested after crashing his car). And as for Harpo Progressions—which my dad, unlike my mom, loved with no reservations—Nakamook was the champion. He had performed the only epic one that I had ever heard of. It was, in fact, by way of that progression that 153

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Benji and I became best friends. The whole thing lasted nearly two weeks and was performed on Monitor Botha, who was bald.

The baldness of Botha was the kind where the hair that remains rims the head like the seat on a public toilet. As did pretty much every other man in the world who’d balded similar while being a shmendrick, Botha grew the upper part of one side long and greased its strands flat across his sticky-looking pate. I still have a hard time understanding why men do that. Forgetting that the hairstyle doesn’t fool anyone, ignoring that it highlights what it’s meant to hide, the hairstyle’s name—
combover
—is in the same class of words as unibrow and needlenose and muffintop and tramp-stamp, i.e., not only does the name mock the thing it refers to, but it’s the only name there is for the thing it refers to. So any speaker of English old enough to sport a combover
has to be aware of what it is called, and thereby aware that electing to do what he does each morning in front of his mirror invites disdain. One time after school, I said so to Flowers, and he offered the opinion that men who sported combovers had most likely been doing so since before the word
combover
gained all its prominence; that although in the course of the preceding few years these men couldn’t have avoided hearing the word and knowing the shmendiness that it connoted, a confused kind of pride kept them from changing hairstyles. Like those kids who when you tell them their foot-taps annoy you and then in response they tap faster and harder, these men kept their combovers intact to save face.

It was news to me that
combover
ever lacked prominence—it 154

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seemed so obviously to be the right word—but Flowers paid endless attention to words so I came to believe him, plus the motive he’d described for men sporting combovers seemed to be right for Monitor Botha, who was always trickling. Regardless of the motives behind Botha’s overcombing, though, you’d think he’d be one of the last guys in the world to make fun of some under-weight troubled kid’s hair. At least that’s what I’d have thought.

But Egon Marsh—his dad awaiting trial on charges of child-porn that Egon, of course, was rumored to have starred in; his older brother a tweeker, freshly kicked out of Stevenson High School for possession; his sister Mia autistic, also probably retarded, the only kid in the Cage who never once got stepped (I learned all of this a few weeks later from Benji, maybe three or four days after his epic progression ended, by which time Egon and Mia had both been removed from Aptakisic, removed from the town in which they’d grown up, removed from the custody of their suicidal mother who then committed suicide; all of the rest of Aptakisic, however, had known about Egon’s family for a while)—Egon Marsh was one skinny, troubled kid, and Botha made fun of his hair three times.

At least three times. The three times I saw were on my first day at Aptakisic—the Tuesday following Labor Day weekend—and for all I knew, Botha’d picked on Egon before then, too.

I didn’t even know he was doing it til the third time. The first time, he sniffed at the air and he said, “Something smells rape in here!” And that was true. Something did smell ripe, and it was Egon’s hair, which was matted and oily and flecked with white 155

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bits. He was sitting right next to me, and Botha, at the time he announced that something smelled ripe, was standing a few feet away from our carrels, and because I was new, and I didn’t know Botha, and because I couldn’t imagine a teacher could be such a dickhead to a kid so openly, I figured he was genuinely puzzled by the source of the smell, and I remember I was worried that he and everyone else might think the smell was coming from me.

Short of saying that the smell was Egon’s—which I wasn’t willing to do—I wasn’t able to figure out a way to make it clear it wasn’t mine til after the moment had already passed.

Then a couple minutes later, Botha returned. He did this thing where he acted like a happy bloodhound, sniffing at the air along the trail from his desk to our carrels. This time he said,

“Something smells downright bleddy
Marshy.
” This got laughs from some of the students, and I got
more
worried they’d think I was the stinker—I didn’t get the joke; I didn’t know Egon’s name; I figured that
Marshy
must have been lower-cased, and that it was either Australian or Aptakisical vernacular for
foul
or
gross
—and I still thought Botha sincerely didn’t know the source of the smell, and I knew that I sincerely didn’t want to start my career at Aptakisic as the kid who smells, so in order to make it clear that the stink wasn’t mine, that it would stay if I left and that it wouldn’t follow me, I broke off the tip of the pencil I was using and asked for permission to go to the sharpener, which was fixed to the opposite wall of the Cage. Botha told me that normally he’d give me a step for talking without raising my hand first, but 156