The Instructions (73 page)

I am sorry I was mean to you,

Gurion Maccabee!

I kicked and I tripped you

And said go away!

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THE INSTRUCTIONS

I am sorry I was mean to you,

Gurion Maccabee!

I am so sorry!

I was mean!

Kids piled up at the buswindows and stuck their heads out and looked at us. The ones who were shmendricks made faces, smooched air. Still running, I looked into the eyes of three of them, none of whom I recognized. Each of the three fell back from his window and ducked below the frame.

At the door of June’s bus, she said, “I’m forgiven.”

I said, Yes.

“I wasn’t asking,” she said, then gave me a fast but painful tit-tytwist. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m forgiven.”

I didn’t say anything.

June said, “Good.” She pulled her hoods on and climbed the steps. I watched her make her way down the aisle til she got to the wheel-well seat and sat.

When I spun, I almost broke my nose on Bam Slokum’s elbow, but he moved it just in time.

“June Watermark,” he said to me, “is crazy.”

Take it back, I said.

Bam said, “There’s no such thing, kid. And no one’s listening but you and I and I’m not even fucking with you, just giving you a friendly warning because she’s crazy and crazy girls—they’re dangerous, especially when they’re beautiful. So lighten up.”

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I said, You’re not my friend.

“I’m no one’s friend,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean I don’t

have
friends, nor does it mean I can’t act friendly, and it doesn’t change the fact that you need a friendly warning.” He said it in the same yawny whisper he’d used on the bus the day before. He said, “You’re ten years old and I’ve got at least ninety pounds on you and the way you’re talking to me—it’s like a Pomeranian or a Shih Tzu or some long-haired fucken Chihuahua in a blonde girl’s purse baring his teeth at a Chow. You know what a Chow is? He’s the most loyal guard-dog in the world, but only to one master. Pretty, too. A mane like a lion’s. Comes from China. We got a Chow at my mom’s house. He’s hers. You want to pet him when you see him, his melting black eyes, the mane—he looks almost fake, like a stuffed animal, something to cuddle, but what he wants most is to tear the face off your head. And no warning, either. Chow’s boundaries—not clearly defined. Maybe he lets you pet his mane, maybe his nose even, but then all of a sudden you touch him on the haunch, the knee, someplace you wouldn’t expect was so personal—Chow bites all your fingers off, goes at your vitals when you hit the ground if he’s in the mood, and if you’re reckless enough to backtalk me, you’re reckless enough to think you understand girls like June Watermark, and you don’t understand her because she’s crazy and crazy people—they’re misunderstood. It’s why they’re called crazy. And you probably think you’re in love with her—it’s what Boystar told me you said in the Office, and that’s a fine thing to
say
to a girl, even a crazy 679

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girl, but if you think you mean it, it’s a different story. Because what’s love without understanding, Gurion? A fucken lie it is.”

June isn’t crazy, I said.

“Just warning you,” said Bam.

Busdrivers honked and I turned a little, saw Nakamook looking at me through his buswindow. I thought: You have failed your friend, listening willfully to this kingly basketballer’s monologue.

“Bus can’t leave without you,” Bam said. “Not as long as you’re standing here.”

I said, I know.

He said, “Ah, right. Nakamook. I see him. He sees me seeing him. He saw you seeing him. Everyone’s seeing everyone see everyone and it’s twisting you up in the face because you think you’ve gotta do something to slight me to show him you’re loyal.

It’s always loyalty with that kid, right? Loyalty this and loyalty that. Thing is though, Gurion, your buddy Nakamook knows me, studies me, is on the edge of his seat in terms of when he’s gonna try to end me, and it’s because he thinks I’m his enemy, and maybe I am, but why should you be worried about what he’s thinking right now? Why is it your loyalty getting tested and not his? He hates me so much? He thinks I’m so dangerous, so untrustworthy and dangerous—why isn’t he rushing out here to protect you from me, understand? There’s two possible answers.

One, is that he
is
testing your loyalty—and that ain’t a very loyal thing to do to a friend, ain’t a very friendly thing to do to someone to whom you claim loyalty; and the other possibility is he’s 680

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scared. But if he’s so scared then what does he expect of you here?

Bravery? These questions are rhetorical. What I’m getting at is that’s no dumb guy, Nakamook. He’s sharp, right? Knows himself. Knows it’s either he’s testing you or he’s scared, knows the implications of each, so how can he fault you for having a conversation with me? He can’t. Not if he’s your friend. And so how can you fault yourself? You can’t help it that you like me. People like me. Even people I’ve hurt. Not
while
I’ve hurt them, but after, see. And I’m not hurting you right now. So what are you supposed to do?”

Someone honked a car-horn then. It felt like a rimshot. I revolved. The car was a Jeep. A Cherokee in Aptakisic’s parking lot. Another rimshot. Behind the wheel: a high-school blonde guy, snowboarder sunglasses. He reached a bulgey arm out the window and smacked the fender. “Bam!” he shouted.

“That’s Claymore,” said Slokum.

Geoff Claymore? I said.

“Bam Slokum!” shouted Claymore from his Jeep.

“You want to meet him? We’ll give you a ride. Tell you some stories about your pyro friend over there.” He pointed at Nakamook. Nakamook looked puzzled and off-guard. His eyes looked glassy, but it might have been the bus window. “Look!”

Bam shouted to Claymore. “It’s Benji Nakamook.”

“I thought that smell I smelled was pussy, not gasoline!”

Claymore shouted back.

“Turned out it was both!” Slokum yelled. “Don’t look at me 681

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like that,” he said as he walked away from me. “Don’t look at me all stunned. I’m exactly what’s called for, kid, at all times, and wide open as your mouth may be, you’re not calling for anything.

You’re just standing there, a little boy. Have fun on the bus.”

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11

TEACHERS

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Intramural Bus–Bedtime

ADAM LEVIN

THE INSTRUCTIONS

MIDTERM ESSAY (TAKE-HOME)

7TH GRADE SOCIAL STUDIES (CAGE)

MR. BEAGLE

ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTION IN 1–2 PAGES.

BE SURE TO HAVE A CLEAR THESIS STATEMENT,

CLEAR TOPIC SENTENCES THAT SUPPORT THE THESIS

STATEMENT, AND SUPPORTING EVIDENCE FROM THE

TEXTBOOK TO SUPPORT YOUR TOPIC SENTENCES.

THIS ESSAY IS DUE ON OCTOBER 31.

QUESTION

HOW DID THE EVENTS OF 9/11 CHANGE

WHAT IT MEANS TO BE AMERICAN?

9-1-1 Is a Joke

or

How We Did It at the

Solomon Schechter School of Chicago

Gurion Maccabee

10/31/06

Ancient/Prehistoric

Slapslap is older than giving the swearfinger. It is probably the oldest game human beings still play. The slappee holds his hands out, knuckles-up, above the held-out, knuckles-down hands of the 684

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slapper; the slapper tries to slap the tops of the hands of the slappee, and the slappee tries not to get slapped. Some slapslappers play a flirty, unscored form of which the object is only to play the game, but most play to win. You win when you score a previously agreed-on number of points—usually 13 or 21.

Scoring

It is always the case in scored slapslap that if the slapper attempts to slap one of the slappee’s hands and connects, the slapper gets a point. Apart from that, however, the way the game is scored can vary. Whether the slapper gets one or two points if he slaps both hands, or no points if he only slaps one while trying to slap both; whether when he serves but fails to slap he loses a point, the slappee gains a point, or the failed serve is point-neutral (though never turn-neutral); whether flinching at a fake loses the slappee a point or gains the slapper a point, or balking on a serve loses the slapper a point or gains the slappee a point—all of these rules depend on what has been negotiated by the players prior to the game. And the same goes for when the players switch roles. It is most common for the slapper to become the slappee as soon as he misses. In some games, though, players switch roles after every point scored regardless of who scored it, and in other games a player plays his role for a fixed number of turns (usually 3 or 5), as in ping-pong.

Agreement and Disagreement

It is not uncommon for a slapper to slap so fast that a slappee doesn’t see the slapper’s hand make contact with his own, but the slap will always leave a tactile trace—usually the kind that stings. Therefore, 685

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when the honorable slapper correctly declares that he has scored, the honorable slappee won’t doubt or deny it, for even if he failed to see it, he’ll have felt it. Yet even between two honorable slapslappers who have agreed beforehand on a given set of rules, disagreements are bound to come up. The disagreements will not be concerned with slapping itself, but with flinching vs. twitching, and balking vs. faking, which, because they involve no physical contact, can only be perceived (or mispercieved) visually. Though never quite
resolved
, these disagreements are dealt with practically via one of two means: do-overs or rotating gimmes. Both options are problematic for the same reason: it is in the slappee’s best scoring interests to claim that all flinches are twitches and all fakes balks; it is in the slapper’s best scoring interests to claim the opposite (that balks are fakes, and twitches flinches). And even among the honorable, who, by definition, do not make claims they believe to be false, self-doubt arises. How couldn’t it? How couldn’t an honorable slapslapper allow for the possibility that he saw what he wanted to see rather than what he should have seen (i.e. what truly happened)? And how could an honorable slapslapper with any bent toward rigor whatsoever fail to question whether his opponent’s ability to see what truly happened isn’t complicated by motives similar to those of which he suspects himself?

One Solution

Most great and honorable slapslappers eventually end up playing a form of slapslap in which the only way to score is by slapping, and the only time a turn is counted is when a serve has been attempted.

In other words: balking and flinching are considered both turn- and point-neutral actions, thereby making it irrelevant to distinguish a 686

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flinch from a twitch or a balk from a fake.

This newer form of slapslap, which everyone initially referred to as
simple slapslap
, has become so dominant in the past few years that a great number of its adherents have seen fit to forsake the modifier; these days they refer to the form, simply, as
slapslap
. And the name they give to the original slapslap is
olden slapslap
.

On the other hand, adherents of the original form (of whom I am most certainly one) have continued to call the newer form
simple slapslap
, and to call the original form
slapslap
, even while—

in order to avoid ambiguity when speaking in mixed company or writing mid-term papers—they will occasionally deploy the term
real slapslap
to describe the one they love.

Robotness vs. Roboticness

Though I can understand the motivation to play it, simple slapslap gets me worried and mournful. You cannot simplify what is complicated without subtracting subtlety, and thereby richness; and the willful subtraction of subtlety, no matter how practical it may be (or seem to be), strikes me as a non-scholarly—even
anti
-scholarly
—
endeavor. It is not true that a person’s urge to erase or prevent controversy via simplification necessarily indicates that he aspires to become a robot; that urge existed before anyone even dreamed of robots. Nonetheless, by giving in to the urge to render simple what could defensibly remain complicated, a person becomes more robotic.

Furthermore, real slapslap is just more fun than simple slapslap.

The scholar Emmanuel Liebman once told me that the latter was checkers to the former’s chess. I think that’s an understatement.

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Imagine the rules of boxing were such that boxers weren’t allowed any footwork, were forced to stand in one spot in the middle of the ring and trade blows, one for one, the block their only legal defensive move. The champions would always be the soundest-bodied heavy-hitters. Muhammed Ali would never have lasted a round with Joe Frazier, let alone ever rope-a-doped Foreman. Eventually, as scientific techniques of measurement grew more advanced, boxers wouldn’t even need to enter the ring, much less hit each other, to determine the winner of a given match; the same kind of violence-allergic people on the state boxing commissions who invented the TKO and made it illegal to fight for more than twelve rounds would employ hack physicists to measure the PSI of the boxers’ punches, the rigidity and pressure-aborption capacities of their upper bodies, their pain-tolerance levels, and the physical integrity of their blocks, then plug all these variables into an algorithm and declare the winner. To box, at that point,
would
be as barbaric as the haters say: two men clobbering each other to prove nothing that isn’t already known.

Just as the stronger will always win in such a contest of strength, so will the win always go to the faster in a contest of speed. And simple slapslap is but a contest of speed. Strategy is nearly impossible. Thinking is all but useless. The game allows for no details in which a devil, let alone a human being, might reside. It’s like a novel about people who use common sense to arrive at comforting, commonsense conclusions.