The Instructions (56 page)

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THE INSTRUCTIONS

crazy was because the TV networks were doing to his image what Drucker claimed they were doing, then it was also possible that all the other things Drucker had said weren’t as crazy as they might seem. His tactic made me think of that Lauryn Hill line that Flowers loved, “Even after all my logic and my theory, I add a

‘motherfucker’ so you ig’nant niggas hear me.” Lauryn’s not only telling you about what she does, but in telling you what she does, she’s
doing
what she tells you she does. She makes truth by saying it. Drucker wasn’t making truth when he talked about the studio-tricks, but he
was
making tricks. It was pretty smart of him.

That does not mean that I liked Drucker. I didn’t like Drucker, and I didn’t like that he and others like him existed. I understood why someone had to defend Drucker’s right to speak against my people, and I even understood why it was a good thing that Drucker
had
the right to speak against my people, but I didn’t understand why the person who rose to his defense couldn’t be one of
his
people. I didn’t understand why it had to be one of my people. I didn’t understand why it had to be my father. And neither did the Israelites of West Rogers Park. And so I understood why some of them vandalized our house. If I had not been Gurion, I might have vandalized our house myself.

But understanding is not the same as approval. I could have very easily understood how someone would fall in love with June, for example. And I could understand why someone in love with June would try to kiss June, but still I would not have hesitated to wreck anyone who tried to kiss June. And because he 514

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would love her, this boy who would try to kiss June, he would understand why Gurion would wreck him, and he would try to wreck Gurion for trying to kiss June. And that would have been fine with me, because that boy would not have been Gurion, and so he would’ve been unable to wreck me. And no matter what justification whoever spraypainted our stoop thought he had for spraypainting our stoop, it was the stoop of the Maccabees, and even though the meaning of the “Maccabees Aren’t” graffito was made as limp by its over-clever use of the WELCOME mat as any WAR ever tagged beneath the STOP of a stopsign, the vandal had been bold enough to climb our seven steps and crouch before our front door to convey his limp insult, and for that trespass he would have to suffer.

In the past, no vandal had ever breached our sidewalkline.

They would bomb our fence or the city-owned curb, fling boxes of eggs at our greystone façade, and brick our windshields and sugar our gastanks before we built the garage off the alley, and once, when I was six, someone slung a rock through our living room window and my mother ran outside with a fireplace poker as the vandal’s squealing tires smudged lines on the street—but this was different. This time the vandal had been only a crobar and a wish away from overstepping our very threshold, and it isn’t hard at all to get hold of a crobar, and to make a wish is even easier than that, so I decided I’d stay awake at my window that night with my weapon at the ready. If I crumpled his lenses with U.S. currency, the vandal would never return.

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I would first have to hide the graffito, though, so my dad wouldn’t see it and call the cops. If he called the cops, they would send a squadcar like they had in the past, and the squadcar would scare the vandal off before he got close enough for me to target properly. After a few days, the squadcar would stop coming around, and the vandal would return. It’s what always happened.

And it made sense that the vandals kept returning. When a particular threat has been keeping you from doing something dangerous, and then that threat suddenly disappears, you feel twice as safe doing the dangerous thing as you felt before you ever encountered the threat, like how all the enemies of Jelly Rothstein who believed the untrue version of the Angie Destra milk-spilling/

pouring incident would—once the truth revealed itself—flood into Jelly’s biting-range at a higher rate than they had before they believed the spilling was pouring. And the squadcar was a weak threat, anyway: for the squadcar to be effective, a vandal not only had to imagine what would happen to him if he got caught, but he had to imagine it was likely that he
would
get caught.

That was too hypothetical. Even though the squadcar threat had kept the vandals at bay in the past, I knew it was too hypothetical because it wouldn’t have kept me at bay if I was one of the vandals; if I was one of the vandals, I would know that the likelihood of me getting caught would be very low, and I would do what I came to do. That the vandals of the past were cowards without stealth, or maybe just cowards with no faith in their stealth, was only a matter of chance. And who knew what kind of per-516

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son the vandal who bombed my stoop with “Maccabees Aren’t”

was? Was he like me, or was he like those who’d vandalized us in the past? He was probably not so much like the ones from the past, I thought, because the ones from the past never breached the sidewalkline. But even if he was like those other vandals, he would, like those other vandals, come back once the squadcar was gone. So I knew the new vandal would eventually return, and I knew that other vandals would follow, unless, maybe, the new vandal was marked with something that required little imagination, like blindness. If while bombing the Maccabeean stoop you were made unable to see, you would be unable to bomb the stoop again, and those who’d learn what you’d been up to when you were blinded wouldn’t have to use their imaginations so terribly much, because there you’d be, before them; falling all over the place while learning to walk with a stick and a dog, your shirt scabby with foodsmears you didn’t even know about. You would be marked by Gurion ben-Judah as a penalty for vandalizing his family’s property, and all the vandals would give witness.

And inflicting blindness on the vandal would
not
be an extreme reaction like my father told me it would during Shmidt vs Skokie, when a vandal wrote “jewhater” on our garage door and the squadcar got called against my protests, for how much simpler would it be to take the King-Middle Brick of My False Accusation from my Relics Lockbox and just drop it on the head of the vandal? My bedroom window overlooked our front stoop, and it was surely easier to drop a brick accurately on a head than to get a pair of 517

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pennies into a pair of eyes from the same distance as you’d drop the brick. And a dropped brick would kill the vandal, or at least leave him retarded, and that was far harsher a punishment than blindness, and to exercise a gentler option when a harsher one was more readily available was to exercise restraint, and that was the opposite of being extreme.

Before going inside, I pushed the WELCOME mat on top of the graffito, then went back down the steps and placed five pairs of pebbles at twelve-inch intervals along the walk-up.

When I got to my room, I took a pennygun and some pennies from my Armaments Lockbox and set my deskchair at the open window. Kneeling on the chair, I nailed the first seven pebbles in consecutive projections, missed the eighth, hit the last two, and then tried for the one I missed and missed it again. It was weird to miss the same pebble twice. I got it the third time. The whole thing took fifty-three seconds.

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After retrieving the pennies and the eighth pebble from the walk-up, I returned to my room and turned my computer on. While the OS loaded, I pulled all my lockboxes from under my bed.

I dropped the eighth pebble into the Relics Lockbox. Into the Documents Lockbox, I filed the paper-bag plate with my love declaration in the Aptakisic manila, and then I unfolded and filed the note I’d tossed with Eliyahu of Brooklyn right next to the 518

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manila, but when I got my School Record out of my bag, I could see that there wasn’t enough room for even one of the two folders.

I had known that this problem would eventually come up—

my lockboxes were only half the size of banker’s boxes and I kept on making and finding documents—and I’d decided weeks before that when the time came I’d consolidate my Armaments Lockbox with my Relics Lockbox and put some of the documents from the Documents Lockbox into the former Armaments Lockbox, except I’d thought I had at least another few months before I’d have to come up with an organizing principle that determined which documents went into which box, and now I had to come up with one immediately.

I sat there and tried and I couldn’t come up with one. I kept getting distracted, thinking about the vandal, and Emmanuel on the el talking strife in Israel and rumors about me, and poor Ben-Wa Wolf, and Israelite Shovers, how to start my new scripture, and Slokum on the bus, and how I had trickled and how I had caulked. Plus I was starving. It was like I never even ate that slice of pizza. The sound of my thoughts was whiny, too, like

“Plus I was meowmeow. It was like I meowmoew even meow that slice of meowmeow.”

I punched my desk on the fake copper mailslot—my desk-top used to be our front door—and it dented in the middle, but I didn’t feel better, I felt even worse, that desk was important, a gift from my father, I felt like a jerk, I meow like a meow, and then the chime chimed, the hopeful new-mail chime, I opened my 519

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inbox, found stuff off listservs, got disappointed, but what was I expecting? something from June? vandal fucken vandal, vandal at the threshold, consolidate the lockbox you’ll get the vandal later, it was time to stop whining, to get something done, something simple that functioned, something that worked. I wrote Rabbi Salt:

Sent: November 14, 2006, 6:49 PM Central-Standard Time Subject: Updated List Please?

From: [email protected] (me)

To: [email protected] (Avel Salt, Solomon Schechter School) Rabbi Salt,

I was hoping you could send me an updated list of email addresses of Schechter students, both former and current—mine’s from last year.

Your Student,

Gurion ben-Judah

I thought I heard the back door open, but decided to ignore it.

Something about typing the words “Your student, Gurion ben-Judah,” cleared my head a little, so I typed the words another ten times. Then I deleted all of them but one and sent the email. I still didn’t have an organizing principle for my documents, but I saw I might as well consolidate the relics and armaments. The consolidation was a cinch. (Except for the bells of a couple pennyguns, the Armaments Lockbox didn’t contain anything that could get crushed too easily—there were washers, some coins, 520

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a bunch of wingnuts, and a very primitive, however effective mace that I’d made by wrapping a fist-sized ball of penny-laden duct tape around a doubled-over bootlace—and apart from the eighth pebble, the Relics Lockbox only held my passport, my broken water-resistant watch, an envelope with a cut-off dreadlock that had formed in the middle of my head after I’d refused to let my mom brush my hair for a week one time when I was four, the King-Middle Brick of My False Accusation, and some teeth I’d lost.) All I had to do was remove the pennyguns, dump the Armaments Lockbox into the Relics Lockbox, then put the pennyguns on top, lock the box down and call it my Relics & Armaments Lockbox.

Performing the consolidation completely un-D’d my A, and I came up with an organizing principle that was so easy and simple it embarrassed me to think how the problem had gotten me explosive enough to dent my mailslot:

The original Documents Lockbox would become my

Documents By Or About Gurion Lockbox, and it would contain all my emails and letters, my school record (minus, for the moment, Call-Me-Sandy’s
Assessment
and Rabbi Salt’s letter to Brodsky, which I set aside to read in ISS the next day), the original copy of
Ulpan
, the scripture that Flowers had been red-penning, the scripture that I told Flowers I’d start that evening (once I started it), and
The Story of Stories
.

The former Armaments Lockbox became my Other Documents Lockbox, and that is where I put the hand-to-hand combat manual 521

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my Grandfather Malchizedek wrote for the IDF; an upublished manuscript my father wrote at yeshiva called
Justice in Samuel I
; my mom’s doctoral dissertation,
The Creation and Utilization of

“Accidental” Contingencies in Diadic Behavioral Modication Therap
y; and her galley-proofs of
New Directions in Functional Analytic
Psychotherapy
, which was about to be published by University of Chicago Press.

I’d just gotten all the documents into their boxes when I heard my mom yelling up the stairway.

“Gurion,
bavakasha boy
.” (Please come here!) A “please” from my mother, especially a Hebrew “please,” is its own exclamation point. Probably she’d been calling me for a while and I hadn’t heard her.

Five minutes! I shouted.

I wanted to fix my desk’s mailslot before going downstairs.

My dad built the desk when I was five, after my parents got an addition on the house. He told me he’d had a frontdoor desk at yeshiva just like it, and I thought it was the nicest present, and that it was important that he wanted me to have the same kind of desk that he used to have, and now I’d damaged it with my fist like a real schmuck. I could pound the dent out later, but if I didn’t start the fix—if I didn’t at least find my screwdriver and take the lid off its brackets—I’d have too much sadness to eat dinner across the table from him.

“Now!” my mom shouted.

Is Aba home? I shouted.

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