The Instructions by Adam Levin
I won’t really break your skull, I said.
Nakamook said, “You can’t get to my skull.” Then he touched my earlobe to be a show-off, and I put mock-strangulation to his throat.
Mr. Klapper let us out of detention a couple minutes early. When he collected the assignments, he handed out dum-dum lollipops with weird, texty wrappers. “Not because you’re a bunch of dum-dums,” he said, “but because my son is a dentist.”
Eliyahu caught up to us at my locker.
Where were you? I said.
“Afternoon davening,” he said. “In the reference section. My aunt and uncle become verklempt when I daven in the house.”
I said, They’re not orthodox?
He said, “They’re not.”
There was a note in my locker from My Main Man Scott Mookus.
H LLO!
Soon th nd.
—Mookus
Main Man dropped all his E’s. He’d pronounce them when he spoke, but couldn’t see them written, so he’d leave blanks for them when he wrote. It is fin sinc you can assum th sound of th m. And ink is saved.
Nakamook yanked a string of Eliyahu’s tzitzit and said, “What’s your intramural bus?”
“I was told Bus One,” Eliyahu told him.
“Mine too,” Benji said.
I said to Benji, Co-Captain Baxter’s on your bus.
There were nine regular buses, but only three intramural ones.
“That bancer,” said Benji.
I said, He knocked Eliyahu’s hat off.
“Want me to avenge you?” Benji said.
“Thank you, but no,” said Eliyahu. “If need be, Gurion has taught me how to send forth metaphoric boulders from my hands, but I hope need won’t be. Such a need fulfilled would pain my stomach.”
Benji said, “If you don’t wreck him, he’ll come for you again.”
“Boulders in his brains when he comes for me then, but boulders no sooner,” said Eliyahu. “However, if he does come for me, and when he comes his friends accompany him—”
“Sure,” Benji said. “I’ll cripple his friends.”
“I was thinking restrain,” said Eliyahu.
Nakamook said, “A wheelchair restrains.”
“True,” said Eliyahu, “but just short of a wheelchair is a cane, and what is a cane if not but a bludgeon waiting to happen? Surely it would be better if those we once restrained were not, the next time we encountered them, carrying bludgeons, let alone bludgeons whose contact with our bodies would be made somewhat ironic by the origin of their carriage’s necessity.”
Nakamook said, “Actually, to be a bludgeon, in the purest sense of the word, a cane would have to be extra stout and weigh more at one end than it does at the other. Still, even if they were just canes, we’d be—”
“We’d be in a very cocked-up situation with a bunch of needless chazerai that who would want to bother with it?” said Eliyahu.
“Killing would make more sense than crippling,” Nakamook said.
“There’s no need to talk that way,” Eliyahu said. “It’s uncalled for, really.”
Benji said, “Just pattering, man.”
“My apologies for misunderstanding,” said Eliyahu. “I have a hard time with the deadpan esthetic. I love Charlie Chaplin and Harpo Marx, and can enjoy Groucho, but Buster Keaton and Andy Kaufman, who—though I occasionally find them delightful—they trouble me the rest of the time. While we’re on the subject, I might mention my belief that girls who like Woody Allen movies are nicer girls than girls who don’t, and I have little use for Jerry Seinfeld. That is not to say no use, but rather—”
“You have to like Kramer, though,” Nakamook said. “You have to love George Costanza.”
Eliyahu said, “Those two are wonderful, sure, but Seinfeld himself?”
“Well, he’s no Larry David, I’ll give you that, except—”
“I share that opinion,” Eliyahu said.
The cafeteria detention let out. Vincie exited through the southern doorway with Asparagus and the Janitor, who nodded at me = We’d come to your locker, but Nakamook is dangerous. I didn’t wave them over. I knew Nakamook wouldn’t attack them, but he would not be happy to stand next to them, either, and he was getting joy from talking comedy with Eliyahu—they’d moved on to Sacha Baron Cohen and Sarah Silverman; Nakamook claimed Cohen might be as good as Larry David, and Eliyahu, like my father, agreed with Nakamook, allowing that it was possible the two were equals, yet holding that Cohen had yet to prove his longevity, that only time would tell, and the same went for Silverman as for Cohen, but she was so gorgeous that her future seemed sadly to be a lost cause; she’d most likely drop serious comedy for animatronix and family pap like Robin Williams and Billy Crystal and Eddie Murphy and Steve Martin and Bill Cosby and almost every other truly funny performer of the previous half-century who hadn’t died by forty and wasn’t Gilbert Gottfried or Richard Pryor—and I saw that it was good: Benji seemed either to have accepted my defense of Eliyahu’s concerns about June’s Israeliteness, or, at least, forgiven him those concerns in favor of being friendly. It was warm, there in Main Hall, in the day’s last minutes, and now here was June, making it warmer—her locker was just down the hall from mine, and she was smiling while she twisted her combination. Right when I noticed, she pulled my hood on to hide her profile, and it seemed like she did so because I noticed: like it was my noticing itself that pulled my hood on, and plus it was my hood, in her freckled hands, and this time it didn’t feel chomsky at all for me to be in her proximity and not approach her. It felt like flirting. She’d told me not to talk to her til the next day’s detention, and I would do as she told me, and she would know I was willing to do as she told me, and maybe she would wish—maybe she was wishing, right there at her locker, behind my blue hood—that I wasn’t forbidden from what she’d forbade, and that, good scholars—that would be even better. Vincie banged fists with Ronrico, came over.
I said, Eliyahu, this is a liar called Vincie Portite.
Vincie said, “I’m no liar.”
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 ‘fucking bullshit.’ Fucking. 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, 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 hall-passes. 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?”
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.
“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?”
“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?”
7
DARK ENOUGH
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
4:45 p.m.–6:15 p.m.
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 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.
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 all
ow 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] 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.
Nakamook said, “You can’t get to my skull.” Then he touched my earlobe to be a show-off, and I put mock-strangulation to his throat.
Mr. Klapper let us out of detention a couple minutes early. When he collected the assignments, he handed out dum-dum lollipops with weird, texty wrappers. “Not because you’re a bunch of dum-dums,” he said, “but because my son is a dentist.”
Eliyahu caught up to us at my locker.
Where were you? I said.
“Afternoon davening,” he said. “In the reference section. My aunt and uncle become verklempt when I daven in the house.”
I said, They’re not orthodox?
He said, “They’re not.”
There was a note in my locker from My Main Man Scott Mookus.
H LLO!
Soon th nd.
—Mookus
Main Man dropped all his E’s. He’d pronounce them when he spoke, but couldn’t see them written, so he’d leave blanks for them when he wrote. It is fin sinc you can assum th sound of th m. And ink is saved.
Nakamook yanked a string of Eliyahu’s tzitzit and said, “What’s your intramural bus?”
“I was told Bus One,” Eliyahu told him.
“Mine too,” Benji said.
I said to Benji, Co-Captain Baxter’s on your bus.
There were nine regular buses, but only three intramural ones.
“That bancer,” said Benji.
I said, He knocked Eliyahu’s hat off.
“Want me to avenge you?” Benji said.
“Thank you, but no,” said Eliyahu. “If need be, Gurion has taught me how to send forth metaphoric boulders from my hands, but I hope need won’t be. Such a need fulfilled would pain my stomach.”
Benji said, “If you don’t wreck him, he’ll come for you again.”
“Boulders in his brains when he comes for me then, but boulders no sooner,” said Eliyahu. “However, if he does come for me, and when he comes his friends accompany him—”
“Sure,” Benji said. “I’ll cripple his friends.”
“I was thinking restrain,” said Eliyahu.
Nakamook said, “A wheelchair restrains.”
“True,” said Eliyahu, “but just short of a wheelchair is a cane, and what is a cane if not but a bludgeon waiting to happen? Surely it would be better if those we once restrained were not, the next time we encountered them, carrying bludgeons, let alone bludgeons whose contact with our bodies would be made somewhat ironic by the origin of their carriage’s necessity.”
Nakamook said, “Actually, to be a bludgeon, in the purest sense of the word, a cane would have to be extra stout and weigh more at one end than it does at the other. Still, even if they were just canes, we’d be—”
“We’d be in a very cocked-up situation with a bunch of needless chazerai that who would want to bother with it?” said Eliyahu.
“Killing would make more sense than crippling,” Nakamook said.
“There’s no need to talk that way,” Eliyahu said. “It’s uncalled for, really.”
Benji said, “Just pattering, man.”
“My apologies for misunderstanding,” said Eliyahu. “I have a hard time with the deadpan esthetic. I love Charlie Chaplin and Harpo Marx, and can enjoy Groucho, but Buster Keaton and Andy Kaufman, who—though I occasionally find them delightful—they trouble me the rest of the time. While we’re on the subject, I might mention my belief that girls who like Woody Allen movies are nicer girls than girls who don’t, and I have little use for Jerry Seinfeld. That is not to say no use, but rather—”
“You have to like Kramer, though,” Nakamook said. “You have to love George Costanza.”
Eliyahu said, “Those two are wonderful, sure, but Seinfeld himself?”
“Well, he’s no Larry David, I’ll give you that, except—”
“I share that opinion,” Eliyahu said.
The cafeteria detention let out. Vincie exited through the southern doorway with Asparagus and the Janitor, who nodded at me = We’d come to your locker, but Nakamook is dangerous. I didn’t wave them over. I knew Nakamook wouldn’t attack them, but he would not be happy to stand next to them, either, and he was getting joy from talking comedy with Eliyahu—they’d moved on to Sacha Baron Cohen and Sarah Silverman; Nakamook claimed Cohen might be as good as Larry David, and Eliyahu, like my father, agreed with Nakamook, allowing that it was possible the two were equals, yet holding that Cohen had yet to prove his longevity, that only time would tell, and the same went for Silverman as for Cohen, but she was so gorgeous that her future seemed sadly to be a lost cause; she’d most likely drop serious comedy for animatronix and family pap like Robin Williams and Billy Crystal and Eddie Murphy and Steve Martin and Bill Cosby and almost every other truly funny performer of the previous half-century who hadn’t died by forty and wasn’t Gilbert Gottfried or Richard Pryor—and I saw that it was good: Benji seemed either to have accepted my defense of Eliyahu’s concerns about June’s Israeliteness, or, at least, forgiven him those concerns in favor of being friendly. It was warm, there in Main Hall, in the day’s last minutes, and now here was June, making it warmer—her locker was just down the hall from mine, and she was smiling while she twisted her combination. Right when I noticed, she pulled my hood on to hide her profile, and it seemed like she did so because I noticed: like it was my noticing itself that pulled my hood on, and plus it was my hood, in her freckled hands, and this time it didn’t feel chomsky at all for me to be in her proximity and not approach her. It felt like flirting. She’d told me not to talk to her til the next day’s detention, and I would do as she told me, and she would know I was willing to do as she told me, and maybe she would wish—maybe she was wishing, right there at her locker, behind my blue hood—that I wasn’t forbidden from what she’d forbade, and that, good scholars—that would be even better. Vincie banged fists with Ronrico, came over.
I said, Eliyahu, this is a liar called Vincie Portite.
Vincie said, “I’m no liar.”
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 ‘fucking bullshit.’ Fucking. 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, 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
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 hall-passes. 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?”
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.
“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?”
“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?”
7
DARK ENOUGH
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
4:45 p.m.–6:15 p.m.
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 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.
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 all
I have only once spoken to Gurion’s father, Judah, who “defer[s] 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.