He held out his cigarette.
“Not a peacepipe, but a cigarette,” he said. “Let us not engage in acts of symbolism, let alone expect others to behave symbolically. I don’t like to interpret things. And it’s not that I don’t understand your dilemma, it’s just it’s got nothing to do with this cigarette.”
I took the proffered cigarette and dragged at it.
I was more curious than I wanted to be.
“You won’t ask, so I’ll just tell you. You like me as much as any of them do but you fear me, too, and anyone you fear you figure you’ve gotta damage. But then anyone you like you figure you’ve gotta protect. I understand all the machinations of that dilemma, and that’s how come I avoid it by playing to the crowd, so long as necessity doesn’t dictate otherwise, see. Like for instance if you swing that sap, which I can see still ain’t in your pocket you know, necessity would dictate I separate the two of you. After that, it’s a safe bet you’d be in some pain. Apart from that, though, it’s a safe bet I act like a friend, an older brother even.”
And if I had no sap, but the crowd wanted you to hurt me? I said.
“Then I’d hurt you.”
I told him, You’d be a hypocrite.
He said, “That’s juvenile, Gurion, hypocrisy’s a juvenile idea, an accusation slaves throw around to gain a false sense of empowerment, it’s beneath you.”
But I’m right, I said. I said, If you liked me, but you hurt me just to please a crowd, you’d be a hypocrite.
He beckoned with a sideways peace sign. I hit the cigarette again, handed it back.
“When you say stuff like that, like ‘just to please a crowd,’ you indicate your failure to understand the Way of Barnum because what I’m telling you is—”
The way of what? I said.
“I just said the Way of Barnum, didn’t I? That’s a little dorky of me, though I hope endearingly so. Sometimes I think of myself in the third person, which is actually a by-product of practicing the Way of Barnum, believe it or not. I can sort of watch myself, from the outside, and it monkeys with my use of language on occasion.”
Your name’s Barnum? I said.
“I wouldn’t put too fine a point on it I were you. Follow the bloody trail to that bureaucrat Mohan’s left ear you want to see what happens,” he said.
“Mohan” was Martin Mohan, a yearbook kid with arty hair. He was always snapping photos of Jennys in the hallways, saying stuff like “Fantastic tableau! Don’t move a muscle!” and extending his bottom lip to loudly blow the pricey bangs off his over-knit brow while reading his light-meter for far longer than it takes to read a light-meter.
“Last year,” Bam said, “I was seeing this girl on yearbook staff and she tells me Mohan, who’s like, some kind of underling editor at that point, she tells me he’s got a photo of me titled ‘Barnum Slokum Dunks.’ Tells me Mohan won’t call it ‘Bam Slokum Dunks’ because Barnum’s the name on the copy of Desormie’s roster Mohan’s gonna print on the facing page and something about ‘verbal consistency’ or ‘verbal integrity’ or some nonsense. But you ever seen Desormie’s writing? It’s like a palsied monkey’s if you made it use its left hand. And he can’t spell either. He misspells the word ‘coach.’ And not just occasionally. He regularly spells it C-A-U-T-C-H, like how Mike Ditka would say it. Anyway no one was gonna be able to read the roster anyway. So I found Mohan and I said so, and I told him it was my name, not his and he should respect my wishes. I was nice about it. I cited relevant precedents. Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson did not go by Earvin all too often and hardly anyone knows the great bambino was George Ruth. But Mohan, he kept saying the word ‘officially’ to me. He said, ‘Bam’s not officially your name. Officially, your name is Barnum.’ And that’s true. My name is definitely Barnum. And it’s a family name and I’m fond of it. It’s a strong name. Barnum. But a person’s name loses power on the lips of others. And so the person whose name it is loses power. That’s a long-established fact. ‘That’s my name, don’t wear it out.’ The third commandment. Etcetera. So I don’t like other people saying my name. To say ‘Barnum’ while not simultaneously being Barnum is to take my name in vain. And I explained to Mohan that to write my name would urge others to take it in vain, but he couldn’t hear me at first, so I explained some more, until I was all he could hear, and then some more, until he couldn’t hear much of anything for a while.”
Bam dragged deeply at the cigarette and squinted at the cherry, exhaling slowly as he spoke.
“Anyway,” he said, “what I was saying before we so fascinatingly digressed together was that when you say stuff like ‘just to please a crowd,’ you’re missing the point of what I’m trying to tell you, which is this: Except for self-preservation there’s no higher motive than crowd-pleasing, and my situation here at Aptakisic and in the world at large greatly minimizes the chances that acts which are needed to please crowds would ever come into conflict with acts needed to preserve myself. It’s an elegant system. I’m very elegant. There’s no room for hypocrisy in an elegant system such as the Way of Barnum because the point is I wouldn’t like you if they wanted me to hurt you, and so I’d hurt you, no qualms.
“Today, you know, it looked like you and those other little guys were attacking that B-team Shlomo kid who because he plays basketball everyone expects me to protect him from outsized beatdowns. Truly I couldn’t care less about that kid, but if I stood by and let seven guys hurt him, see, I would be failing to live up to expectations. Same time, there was no call to damage you — just to protect B-team. So there was nothing to be gained by damaging you. So I pulled you out of the fight and let you be. Even after you jumped at me I let you be. And I’m letting you be right now. I’m a simple animal. Consistent, elegant. The proof’s in the pudding. Yet you’re still confounded by my inaction just now when you were making Maholtz your bitch, let’s have another.”
He lit a second cigarette off the first, which he then dropped between us. I stepped on it.
“You’re confounded because, once again, you’re not paying attention to what I’m saying. Everyone hates Maholtz, and so I hate Maholtz. The only reason I don’t fuck him up is because he supplies me with a couple things that no one else in this school can get their hands on, and what he supplies is good for the cause of my self-preservation. The fact that he’s on the basketball team excuses me from having to fuck him up — in the eyes of the crowd, see. See, if I did fuck him up, they would be happy about it, but that I don’t fuck him up is readily excusable because of how we’re teammates and teammates aren’t expected to harm each other. Nonetheless, I am in no way obligated to step in to protect him from you — or anyone else, except maybe Nakamook — in any kinda one-on-one deal. Or, in any case, the crowd didn’t want that. What they wanted was for you to make Maholtz your bitch. At least until you did so — and with great aplomb, I commend you — at which time they felt like pussies but that’s a spooky train of thought we don’t need to pursue because the only thing I’m getting at is if I’d stepped in against you, they would have been displeased with me. And in the end, it turns out you did me a solid. Listen to them tommorrow and hear it yourself. Listen to what they’ll say. See, since I let Maholtz take his lumps within such close temporal proximity to the incident with B-team, the crowd assumes that I’m a righteous human being. They assume I’m not blindly loyal to basketball players just because they’re basketball players but that I’m filled with some clumsy complicated system of archaic scruples that their parents taught them was good and that these scruples I’m filled with dictate that I protect the B-team kid and let Maholtz suffer a little.”