The Instructions (75 page)

Territory

No Chicagoland junglegym could beat Schechter’s bigtoy. The bigtoy’s creator, except for (years later) Philip Roth, is the only person I ever wrote a fan letter. Unlike Philip Roth, who thought I was a prankster,* the bigtoy’s creator was dead. I didn’t find that out til

* Roth’s response to my letter, in its entirety:

Dear Lioncub, Son of Judah the Mallet,

Whereas the praise you’ve showered on my work is deeply flattering, your reading of
Operation
Shylock
eerily incisive, and the section of your letter in which you mimic recent so-called Jewish wunderkind authors both terrifically cruel and on point, your insistence that you are a grade-schooler—despite being mildly entertaining at first—quickly grew as tiresome as your pseudonym.

Normally, I wouldn’t mention it—normally, I don’t respond to fan letters at all—but because you strike me as a serious writer of slapstick (I did a Kosmo Kramer–worthy spit-take while reading the part of the letter in which the junior rabbis on the playground debate whether hanging the Natalie Portman poster would violate the second commandment; specifically the section of that dialogue in which Rabbi Samuel claims the poster would be kosher if only the mole on Portman’s cheek—

“This mole a dark half-centimeter of flesh which, in failing to be dissonant with the rest of her face, commands the viewer’s acknowledgment that Natalie Portman is perfect”—weren’t showing, and Rabbi Emmanuel responds tangentially, however talmudically, that the mole is not a mole but a birthmark, “for a mole is a squinty animal in the light of day, and one cannot both squint and wink at once; surely you will not insist, Samuel, that Ms. Portman’s birthmark fails to wink at us in the light of day.”), and because you seemed, as well, to be soliciting my advice, I thought I would offer 697

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I’d written the letter, though.

How I found out was I approached Headmaster Unger to acquire the creator’s name and address, and Unger told me he couldn’t remember the man’s name, but he knew he was dead, that he’d died on Schechter’s campus on a summer’s day in ’97 or ’98 while oversee-ing the bigtoy’s construction, but that if I wanted, he (Unger) could look through some receipts to find the name of the man’s company, and from there I could look the name up in the yellow pages and find the company’s address. I asked Unger why he thought I would be interested in something like that, and he told me that although he hadn’t seen the letter I’d written, he knew I must have put effort into writing the letter, and he thought I would prefer not to waste the effort. I still didn’t understand, and I said so. Unger said he was thinking I could send the letter to the creator’s construction company. But the letter, I told him, wasn’t written to the creator’s construction company; it was written to the creator, and I didn’t get why anyone would deliberately send a letter to someone to whom that letter wasn’t written. “So as not to waste effort,” Unger snapped you some: You don’t need this conceit that you’re a nine-year-old. Nor the pseudonym. Your jokes and insights the both would come across better if instead of writing from the unconvincing POV

of a boy-genius whose name suggests a messianic fate, you wrote from your current POV: that of someone who remembers, or at least chooses to remember, his childhood as a time when he, like so many of us, suspected that he was the messiah, knew his friends to be kind and loyal, and was convinced that most everyone, to some degree, seemed preoccupied with questions as to what it meant to be good.

Best of luck to you. If ever I write you again, it will be after I’ve read your first book. Of course I won’t know its author is you because I don’t know your real name, but I am certain that once you publish a book, someone will get it into my hands. Til then, I have my own novels to complete, and thus no time for pen-palliness. I trust you understand.

Nearly Yours,

Philip Roth

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at me. But the effort was already wasted, I told him. Since the letter wasn’t written to the company, to send the letter to the company would just waste more effort: the effort of looking up the address in the yellow pages, the effort of writing it on the envelope, of printing the letter out, of affixing the stamp, and not least of all the effort of whoever in the company would read this letter which didn’t concern him or anyone else at the company still living.

Unger, though able to muffle the contemptous
hrumph
that his nose made, seemed unable to silence it entirely, and I got the sense that we’d been having a metaphorical kind of conversation without my knowing it, and that I’d insulted him somehow, but at the same time I didn’t feel bad about insulting him, if that’s what I’d done, because that nose-noise—especially because he seemed to have purposely failed at silencing it (how hard is it to hold back a
hrumph
?) as if to indicate that the place from which he just realized he had to condescend to me was so many miles high that he couldn’t, despite all his efforts, even
pretend
to get fully down to my level—indicated, if nothing else, that his was an M.O. of total penility. If he hadn’t made that noise, I probably would have eventually taken the name of the company from him, and even sent the letter, all the while trusting that Unger’s being an elder of mine granted him access to an understanding of the world that I did not yet have. Instead, I thanked him and returned to lunch.

It might be better that the bigtoy’s creator never read that letter anyway. Having recently reread it myself, I see now how it would’ve been possible, even likely, for the creator to misconstrue my sincere praise as backhanded. It would’ve all depended on what kind of guy he was. The attribute the letter claimed to be most important—the 699

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one that made the bigtoy great—was not, I don’t think, an attribute the creator even knew about, much less one he intentionally designed.

Although it’s true a slide descended from each corner of the bigtoy’s platform, and true that all four of these slides were fast, it wasn’t the number of slides or their speed that rendered the bigtoy superlative. And while the 7’ x 8’ wackywall intersecting the eastern side of the platform had footholds and grips spaced perfect for climbertag, it wasn’t the wackywall either. Neither was it the monkeybar dome that rose ten feet above the platform’s safety railing. Nor the seemingly dangerous wood-and-wire bridge off the platform’s south side, which led to the old castle-themed junglegym (the smalltoy) and creaked loud in the cold and would bounce like a waveform if just two big kids jumped hard and no one else was on it. And certainly the yellow ropenet that sagged between the platform’s north side and four ground-anchors seven feet away was a remarkable achievement in itself—twice as remarkable when you noticed the skewed grey grid of shadow it left on the pebbles, and three times so if you ever saw that shadow go bendy during storms—but remarkable as the ropenet was, even it paled beside the true source of the bigtoy’s superlativeness.

All of these aspects combined did. It was not the sum of the bigtoy’s parts that made the bigtoy superlative, but the difference between that sum and the portion of the universe containing it. It was what the bigtoy surrounded.

With the
possible
exception of certain eighth-grade girls (their preference for the swingset had always seemed fake), everyone’s favorite part of the playground was the territory ceilinged by the bigtoy’s platform. Five steel poles that were set in cement held the platform level seven feet above the earth. The platform’s gapless 700

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planks, rubberized for traction, kept the territory dry in the rain and the snow, and the shade it provided was thorough enough to make everything it covered look blue. This shade, in the morning, was perfectly square-shaped. To slapslap within it—especially when other kids were gathered outside it—made you feel like a performer in a reverse-lit arena. And it wasn’t just the best spot at Schechter to slapslap. It was the best spot at Schechter to do nearly anything.

Gossip you heard there always seemed urgent, and secrets you told completely secure. The baseball-card kids would go there to trade.

The handheld kids would crouch there and game. If you cried with your back pressed to one of the poles, your sobs would leave your throat so heavy and loud that by the time you slid down to sit in the pebbles, your palms on your cheeks, your fingers all gooey, you’d know you’d never cry about the same thing again. After every school-dance, some couple firstkissed there. It was where you would meet to share cigarettes on weekends. At night, it was said, teens went there to drink, to lay in the pebbles and go to third base. So if you wanted a spot there before the first bell, you had to rise early, rain or shine. No more than nine kids could fit uncrammed within the boundaries. No more than six if you wanted to slapslap.

Everyone wanted to slapslap.

Overthrow

It was from under the bigtoy that we’d end the reign of simple, me and Emmanuel and Samuel Diamond. On my second Monday at Schechter—August 27, 2001—our plan got formed during lunch: First we made a pact that we wouldn’t simple slapslap, not with each other or anyone else. Second, we’d take the territory every morn-701

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ing. The schoolday began at 8:30, so at 7:25 I’d meet Emmanuel and Samuel at Rosemont and Artesian, and if the weather was nice we’d walk the twelve blocks, and if it was lousy we’d ride the bus.

Either way we’d get to school by five to eight, beating the earliest early-morning regulars by at least ten minutes, and we’d get under the bigtoy and slapslap. There’d be room enough for three more kids. If not the best simple slapslappers at school, we knew they’d be some of the most die-hard; they’d have had to rise extra early to get their spots, too.

Six slapslappers under the bigtoy = enough slapslappers to keep three slapslaps going at once. Owing to our pact, though, no more than one of these slapslaps would ever be simple. Either two of the three would be real and one simple, or only two slapslaps—one real and one simple—at a time would be played, while the third member of each group spectated.

In the latter case, the crowd who gathered to watch—the crowd was always thick by a quarter after eight—would protest that the space taken up by the third players was wasteful = a lot of pressure on those players to get a third slapslap going. Since the other three wouldn’t have a pact, their third would be less able to withstand that pressure than ours. Thus, the former case would obtain, if not by the first or second day then certainly by the third = Two reals, one simple. That is how we would get others to start playing real slapslap with us.

There were four main reasons why they’d
keep
playing real slapslap. As previously noted, to master real slapslap entailed mastery of all the skills of simple slapslap, plus more, and therefore the more the simple slapslappers played real, the more dominant they’d 702

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become at simple. Second, once they got used to playing real, simple would seem a lot less fun. Third, crowds liked controversy. They liked to argue with umps and refs. Being that real slapslap entailed scoring controversy where simple didn’t, the crowd around the bigtoy would pay more attention to the real slapslaps than the simple ones. And then finally, there was me. I was unbeatable. Simple, real, it didn’t matter. Few could even score on me. And who was I? Who was Gurion ben-Judah if not the new kid who swore and insisted real slapslap was the ultimate?* They would want, if not to be like me, then to beat me. In order to do either, they’d have to real.

That was the softpower part of our plan to end the reign of simple at Schechter.

The hardpower part was to be put in effect exactly two weeks from the day the softpower part started: I would challenge all comers to whichever form of slapslap they wanted to play. If anyone beat me, then Samuel and Emmanuel and I would permanently relin-quish the territory under the bigtoy. If no one beat me, the bigtoy would be declared a real-only zone.

This hardpower part we thought of as a contingency plan. We assumed the softpower part would end simple on its own.

It almost did. By recess of the thirteenth day since the softpower part’s enactment—September 10—we anticipated only two chal-lengers: Shmooly Gooses and Joshua Pritikin. Whereas Gooses was a slow boy who couldn’t grasp the rules of real, let alone the psychology of faux-faking, Pritikin was not just a champion of simple,

* Actually, by the end of my second week at Schechter, my reputation as a scholar was beginning to spread, and a lot of kids had started making friends with me; at the time we devised the plan, however, only the kids in my Torah Study liked me.

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but a completely uncompromising loyalist. He was the one simple slapslapper in all of Schechter who’d refused beneath the bigtoy to cave to the crowd. He’d point to us and tell them, “Blame it on these three.” But no one would blame it on us. Instead they’d boo Pritikin, call him a mamzer, demand that he real with our third.

Though I admired Pritikin for being such a hardhead, I didn’t doubt for a second I’d rout him. Shmooly Gooses only scored when someone let him, and we’d already decided that for his sake we’d make an exception. To ban Shmooly from playing simple under the bigtoy = banning Shmooly for being slow. He really couldn’t understand the rules of real, so he’d still be allowed to simple in the territory, as would anyone else—just as long as they were doing it with Shmooly.

In short, we saw the hardpower part of the plan as a formality.

Pritikin was honorable, so we knew he’d take the challenge, we knew I’d shut him down, and that he’d accept the consequences.

Shmooly I’d go through the motions of almost losing to, and I’d then, for his benefit, explain to him and the crowd that his near-defeat of me granted him the privilege described above.