The Instructions (47 page)

I said, You told me you fill the detention assignments with curse words and never get in trouble.

He said, “I said no one reads them. I never said anything about curse words.”

I said, They do read them and I can’t believe you’re still lying to me. I remember exactly what you said. It was my first detention and you said, ‘Don’t worry, no one even reads these.’ And then I said to you, ‘Well why do you even write on them?’ And you said, ‘I get bored, so I just write fuck and bullshit.’

“Fucking bullshit,” Vincie said. He said, “I said ‘fuck
ing
bullshit.’ Fuck
ing.
Get a hearing aid.” Both times he stressed
ing
, his hand jumped to his eye, so I let him keep last dis. Then I gave him my dum-dum. It was cherry.

“Everyone’s favorite,” Vincie said. He stuck it in his mouth and made a face at the wrapper. “Who’s Dr. Harmon Klapper, DDS?”

he said. “Why should I call him at (847) 459-0638? Why should I visit him in Wheeling? I hate fucken Wheeling. Wheeling is suck. And what about Ben-Wa? We haven’t even talked about that. That was
really
suck! Except for after that ink shot into my eye, and Botha told me, “Not brilliant, Portite,” and my eye blocked pieces of things I looked at and made the unblocked pieces look shadowed and when I got sent to the nurse because of it and I stopped in the bathroom to piss and when I took out my wang to piss and my wang looked like a disappearing trombone, 431

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that was the worst thing I’ve ever seen, that kid pissing on himself. That’s weird, huh? How the two worst things involved piss?

I think it’s weird.”

And that’s when I got the idea to give Ben-Wa some blank hall-passes. I thought I’d drop a couple through the venting of his locker, and then he’d find them in the morning and would feel like his luck had changed.

I asked Vincie: Do you know where Ben-Wa’s locker is?

“I don’t think you should be mean to him, Gurion,” Vincie said. “I don’t think you should write things on his locker or leave him some rhyming poem about how he pissed himself because that is one kid who has suffered enough. And I’m not the only one who thinks so either. You saw how the whole Cage almost killed Forrest for Boy Who Went Wee-Wee. You were one of the first ones, yourself. I saw. He’s suffered enough, that kid.”

I said, I’m not gonna do anything mean, Vincie.

Then I explained to him.

He said, “You’ve got blank hall-passes and you’re not gonna share?”

“Easy, Spastic,” Nakamook piped in. “I’ve got some, too, and
I’m
gonna share. But I don’t know about Ben-Wa, Gurion—he doesn’t seem like the type of kid to get excited by blank hallpasses. He doesn’t seem like he’d use them. I mean, instead of getting up to piss without permission, he pissed himself
waiting
for permission. You see a person like that forging a robot’s signature and roaming the hallways?”

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I don’t know, I said. I said, Why’s he in the Cage with us if he’s not that kind of person?

“No one knows,” Vincie said. “It’s probably a mistake.”

Eliyahu said, “Mistake mishmake, it’s always better to give tzedaka than withhold it.”

“I hate that guy’s voice and I don’t know what he has to do with anything we’re talking about, Eliyahu,” Vincie said.

“What guy?” said Eliyahu.

“That singing fuckface asshole Sedaka who my fuckface old smelly asshole stepdad loves, what do you mean what guy?”

“I’m talking about tzedaka, and you’re talking about a singer?”

“Who do you
think
I’m talking about, man? Are you trying to make me crazy? He’s that fuckface asshole who sings that fuckface asshole song about breaking up is hard to do and commacomma down doobydoo downdown and now it’s stuck in my head and I’m going crazy and there’s an even more annoying one than that, and what’s really fucken sick is that for some reason I’m trying to remember it anyway and, when I do, that’s the one that’s gonna be stuck in my head. Any second now. Any fucken second now.”

Tzedaka
is charity, Vincie, I said.

“Sedaka is a fucking asshole fuckface, Gurion!” shouted Vincie, hand on his eye throughout.

Do any of you know where Ben-Wa’s locker is? I said.

Nakamook said, “Nope.”

“If I knew, I would say so,” said Eliyahu.

“‘Run Samson Run,’” said Vincie.

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“And why would Samson run?” said Eliyahu. “The strongest man in Israel? He should run? He shouldn’t run, unless—”

“He should run because Sedaka would sooner trust a hungry lion than a gal with a cheating heart because he. Is. A. Fucking.

Asshole. Fuckface. Shithead. Fuckface. Asshole. Fuck. Face. Shit.

Fuck. Wang…”

“Well,” Eliyahu said, “Sedaka may in fact be right in that case—if, that is, Delilah is the gal to whom he’s referring. I don’t usually think of her as a
gal
, for although a
gal’s
looks may fall on the attractive side, they surely wouldn’t do so in a spectacular way, whereas Delilah’s beauty is believed to have exceeded that of all other women during the era in which Samson reigned—

and I’d believe it, too. He was a judge of Israel, and Delilah a Philistine. Would a judge marry a Gentile, let alone a Philistine, were that Philistine not a stunner? I would tend to doubt it.

However, given the context in which
gal
appears, Delilah would seem to be the one your Sedaka is advising Samson about. Samson surely would have been better off avoiding her, though who is to say whether Israel would have been better off? At the end there, Samson killed a lot of important Philistines, Vincie. Any one of them might have been a plague on Israel, and who’s to say Samson would have ever gotten to kill that one—assuming such a one did, in fact, exist—if he hadn’t run
toward
Delilah? It’s a rhetorical question, so you don’t have to respond.”

Vincie was punching the sides of his own head.

Nakamook said, “Why did Samson kill so many people?”

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“You want the short or the long answer?” said Eliyahu.

“I don’t trust long answers,” Nakamook said.

“The short answer is Samson was a holy man, devoted to God, and God wanted some people killed because they were trying to hurt the Israelites, who God was loyal to, so Samson did it. For God. And the Israelites.”

“Out of loyalty,” Nakamook said.

“For justice,” said Eliyahu. “Loyalty’s the short answer.

Justice—takes a while to explain.”

I said, Does anyone ride Ben-Wa’s bus in the morning?

“Nope,” said Nakamook, who was leaning back on a locker now, his eyes closed and squinty at the edges.

“I do,” Vincie said.

I tore off three hall-passes and handed them over, told him to give them to Ben-Wa in the morning.

“What about for me?” Vincie said.

Nakamook said, “I told you I’d give you some.” He gave him some.

“Instead of breaking up, I wish that we were making up again,”

said Vincie.

“And this is how you thank a friend for a gift? With nonsense?” said Nakamook.

“You would make fun of the way I speak?” said Eliyahu.

And Benji said, “So what good is an homage without a little fun?”

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7

SIGNIFY

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

4:45 p.m–6:15 p.m.

THE INSTRUCTIONS

AN ASSESSMENT OF A CLIENT:

Gurion Maccabee

(Week Three Assignment)

Sandra Billings

9/25/06

Psychodynamic Methods I, SSA 545

Professor Lakey

Introduction

Over the past three weeks, I have had five forty-minute individual sessions with the client, Gurion Maccabee, who has also participated in three thirty-minute group sessions.*

A ten-year-old Jewish-American boy of mixed racial background, Gurion lives in the West Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago, from where he commutes to Aptakisic Junior High School (my first-year field placement) in Deerbrook Park by means of Metra, el-train, and school-bus. For most of his life, he has flourished at school, both socially and academically. Historically, his grade-reports are glowing, particularly those authored by his Reading and Bible Study teachers. It was not until May of last year that Gurion began to violently act out. The incidents of violence, which are duly represented in the accompanying documents, led to his expulsion from three separate Chicagoland-area middle schools: the Solomon Schecter School of Chicago, Northside Hebrew Day

* As per the assignment, all five sessions were recorded on mini-cassette and are available at your request.

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School, and Martin Luther King Middle School. Owing to the nature of his expulsions (see
Admissions Record
, attached), Gurion was placed in the Aptakisic Cage program for a three-week probational-observational period and, based on the assumption that he would enter into the regular student population at the termination of this period, he was demoted from the seventh to the fifth grade, the rationale behind this decision being based the assumption of myself and my supervisor (Bonnie Wilkes, PsyD*) that Gurion’s difficulties had their roots, at least partially, in his being surrounded by classmates two years his senior. Since meeting with Gurion, I have revised my opinion about the origin of the difficulties’ roots. Beyond that, I am going to recommend that Gurion remain indefinitely in the Cage and, because grade-level is socially irrelevant in the Cage anyway, I will also recommend that he be re-promoted to Grade 7, the schoolwork of which would at least be a bit more suitable to his intellectual gifts than that of Grade 5. I do not anticipate any resistance from my supervisor or from the principal in either of these regards.

* Is it so weird to see your actions and motives discussed in an academic paper, Bonnie? It was definitely weird for me to write about you, knowing that you’d be reading what I wrote—not to say that I take issue with your (from what I’ve been told) highly uncommon policy of reading everything your interns write about their clients, not at all. That is to say that if the paper at hand does shed any light on Gurion that may prove useful to you, I’ll be proud. Either way, I hope we’ll have time to process all of the weirdnesses in our next supervision session. (Btw, for obvious reasons [like formality and relevance to the assignment at hand], this footnote does not appear in the version of the paper that I handed in to Professor Lakey—It may be the case, as you sometimes seem to be telling me in veiled ways during supervision, that I’m a little too permissive or forgiving sometimes and that I have a convoluted and tangent-ridden explanation-style, but I’m definitely not some kind of flake or weirdo who’d include a footnote addressed to you in a paper being read by one of my professors. Anyway, jIH muSHa’ Daj tlhej Hoch wIj tIq [that’s, “Have a good weekend,” in Klingon. {JK!—not JK that it’s Klingon, but JK that I’d think Klingon was appropriate.}]) 438

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Psychosocial History

MEDICAL

The client is of average height and weight for his age. His medical records and self-reports offer no indication of his having suffered head trauma or any other physical ailment that might provide an organic account of his behavior.

PARENTAL

Gurion is the only child of Judah, a civil rights lawyer, and Tamar, a clinical psychologist.

Since he was added to my caseload three weeks ago, I have been in sporadic telephone contact with the client’s mother. Mrs.

Maccabee has refused to allow my supervisor (Bonnie Wilkes, PsyD), to administer any standardized Psych. or IQ tests to her son (the trial-by-fire-type challenge that this lack of cooperation on the part of a client’s primary caregiver provides a new caseworker being, I believe, a feature reason for why Ms. Wilkes, PsyD, added Gurion to my caseload* ), and has displayed some measured hostility toward the probational-observational process. On one occasion, the mother stated, “I know about Cage programs, Ms. Billings. I know that there is no such thing as an appropriate candidate for a Cage program. Furthermore, I know what a behavioral disorder is, and I can assure you that Gurion does not have one.” On another occasion: “You lack the capacity to fathom my son.”

I have only once spoken to Gurion’s father, Judah, who “defer[s]

* Am I right, Bonnie?… supervision on Monday.

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to Tamar in all matters pertaining to Gurion’s psychological well-being in the scholastic environment and so would appreciate it if

[I] just went to [his] wife with [my] nonsense, which is not to say that [my] nonsense is objectively nonsense, as in ‘a verbal phenomenon that fails to convey anything even fractionally meaningful, let alone compelling,’ but rather that to [him], personally, that’s how

[my] nonsense comes off, and so why not just always call Tamar and never [him] with [my] nonsense is what [he’s] hoping to get across to [me].”

PRECURSORS AND WARNING SIGNALS

The physical assault against the headmaster of the Solomon Schecter school, which resulted in Gurion’s expulsion from that learning institution, was the first atypically violent behavior to appear on Gurion’s scholastic record. Gurion denies that any major change in his home-life had occurred prior to the assault, and his parents (I hesitate to say “corroborate his denial,” as “corroborate his denial”

seems so darned criminal justicey and no one’s on
trial
, here) affirm his denial’s accuracy. Furthermore, the teachers at Schecter who I’ve interviewed over the telephone have all remarked on the utter dearth of warning signs preliminary to the assault, as have those at Northside Hebrew Day and MLKJH in regard to the acts that earned Gurion expulsion from their respective schools.

Gurion, himself, justifies the three “actions” that led to his expulsions in the following ways.