I won the first three rounds 13–nothing, but Simon Katz, the sixth-grader I was to face in the championship round, was much better than my first three opponents. I’d watched the last two points of his semi-final. He wasn’t as fast as me, but he was really fast, so I decided I’d mess with him out of the gate.
I won the roshambo for serve (scissors to his paper), and opened with a fake. Simon Katz flinched. I called 1–0 Gurion. “You didn’t slap me, kid,” said Katz. I told him he flinched. “What do you think this is, a nursing home?” he said. I asked him what that was supposed to mean. Simon Katz just said “Tch,” and I figured that he was trying to tell me that he hadn’t flinched, but dodged, the implication being that I’d balked and so it was not 1–0, but either a gimme or a do-over. I figured that when he asked me if I thought we were in a nursing home, he was saying that people in a nursing home often had weak vision, but that he didn’t have weak vision like someone in a nursing home, so if he saw a balk, then a balk there had been.
I knew I hadn’t balked — my fake was all chin — but I also knew there was no way to settle the argument. So I said to Simon: Are we playing do-overs or rotating gimmes?
Simon said, “The score’s 0–0.”
I took that to mean do-overs.
Then I did another chin-fake, and Simon flinched again.
I called 1–0, Gurion.
“What is wrong with this kid?” Simon said to the crowd — this crowd had gathered to watch the finals.
I said, Look, I know I won’t convince you by insisting, but that was not a balk. I didn’t even move my hands. Why don’t you pay attention to my hands instead of my face. And stop calling me kid, because I’m Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, and unless you’re really small for your age, you’re not thirteen yet, so you’re a kid too, and I don’t keep calling you kid, so don’t call me kid.
It was not a very elegant speech — I didn’t know how they talked on the playground yet, and I had yet to learn concision.
Simon Katz was not a dickhead at all, and he immediately ceased to call me kid, but when he said, “Look, Gurion ben-Judah, we play slapslap here, not olden slapslap,” I thought I sensed contempt in the unfamiliar phrase olden slapslap, and the presence of this contempt was then corroborated by some other kid behind me who said, “Olden slapslap is Lame Lamey von Lamey McLamensteinowitz.” The popular X Xey von Xey McXensteinowitz joke-form was unfamiliar to me at that time, and I thought this kid behind me, on top of the contempt for whatever any of them meant by olden slapslap, was expressing contempt for the many syllables of my name.
And I said, You are all a bunch of fuckers.
There was a collective gasp, a giggle or two, and then someone said, “You can’t swear.”
I can’t what? What can’t I do? I said.
The concept of swears was, at that time, also foreign to me.
“You can’t say the eff-word.”
What’s the eff-word?
“The word you just said.” “You called us effers.”
I didn’t call you effers. I called you fuckers. You’re all fuckers, I said. You’re fuckers because you’re not honorable slapslappers and you’re fuckers because of how you make fun of my name, which is a good, strong name my parents gave me, you fuckers.
“That’s a bad word!” they said, and half of them went to the other side of the playground.
The fuck are they scared of? I said.
That is when I first noticed Emmanuel Liebman and Samuel Diamond. They were laughing, and even though I wasn’t laughing, it seemed like they were laughing with me somehow, and that gave me a good, brotherly feeling, so I decided I liked them.
“The eff-word, Gurion ben-Judah,” said Simon Katz, “is the word in the question you just asked that begins with the letter f. It’s a swear.”
No it’s not, I said.
Even though I didn’t know what exactly a swear was, I could of course tell by the context that a swear was bad, and so I knew the word fuck could not be a swear because it was a word my mom used to say a lot. To an Israeli, who has grown up cursing in Arabic, “fuck” seems like fiddlesticks, “fucker” like meanie. How could it be otherwise? When you curse in Arabic at the rock that has stubbed your toe, what you say to the rock is Coos em ach. Coos em ach = Your mother’s cunt. If someone pisses you off a little, and you don’t want to say something too vile, you tell them they’re the offspring of ten thousand donkeys and a whore. I didn’t understand all of that at the time, nor would I til that afternoon, when after Headmaster Unger heard about my saying the word, he yelled and called my parents, and we had a talk, and my mom decided to stop saying fuck so much and so did I. All I knew right then, on the playground, was that my mom said fuck and fucker when she was mad or annoyed, and so it wasn’t, at least to me, a bad word any more than the word bad was a bad word.
It’s not a swear, I said.
“It is,” said Simon.
So what the fuck is a swear then?
“It’s a word bad people say.”
I said, Take it back.
“I can’t take back facts, Gurion ben-Judah.”
I said, Take it back now, you pussing leprosy from between the scabrous vaginal lips of a discount vestigially-tailed prostitute for whom any one of your sixty-seven possible syphilitic fathers were either stupid or crazy enough to pay nearly twice her value for at eighteen cents, fuck.
“Whoa.”
Woe unto you, you filthy crevice-sniffing—
But Simon Katz — a nice boy — was already walking away.
I started choking up because of how everyone I’d met hated me for doing nothing other — at least as far as I could tell — than playing unimpeachable slapslap and defending my family. I had not had much contact with other kids my age, but I’d always assumed that people who I wanted to be friends with would like me. I sat down in pebbles and took deep breaths, and the sting behind my eyes softened before any tears fell.
Soon, Emmanuel and Samuel sat down beside me and said their names. Samuel told me about simple slapslap, and how it made the two of them angry. Emmanuel seemed more disappointed than angry, and he told me that Simon Katz, though nice, was not very bright; that he believed swears were words that bad people said because his mother, knowing that Simon was so nice and therefore wouldn’t want to be a bad person, had told him so. Then he told me what swears were. “They are words that a large group of people agree are forbidden, and so they are good, for if Adonai’s true name were the only forbidden word, then, other than lying, the only way to rebel by speaking would be to break the Law handed down to us by Adonai, either by saying his true name or taking his lesser ones in vain, and since people must rebel by speaking — it is part of being a person, yes? I know you know that — it is better if they have something other than Adonai’s Law to rebel against. It is better for them to have the option to rebel against the rules of man, which are all, ultimately, imperfect.”
Since they’d sat down with me, Samuel had been whipping pebbles at the bigtoy, Emmanuel absently hoisting fistfuls to shoulder-level and spilling them one- and two-at-a-time into a small pile in the middle of us. When Emmanuel was through speaking, I back-handed one of the spilling pebbles so that it struck one of the whipped ones in mid-air and the ricochet was audible. CLACKSH.