I wanted to remind Botha of his limitations, but I was not Hashem and Botha was no Moses. There was no promised land for me to lock him in a cave outside of. So I did what is called a Harpo Progression of Defiance. The first step in the progression was that I pulled the pass back out of the diamond-shaped space and dropped it on the floor.
“Pack it up,” Botha said.
Botha was the monitor and I had to do what the monitor said, so I picked the pass up.
Then I dropped it.
“Pack it up and do not drop it,” he said.
I picked it up and I folded it in four. I pushed it through the gate.
“Unfold it,” he said.
I unfolded it. Then I balled it up and threw it at the lockers behind me, then held up my pointer-finger = I’ll be right back, and I ran toward the lockers and picked the pass up and came back to the gate and folded the pass and unfolded it and tore a notch into each corner of it.
He could not ask me to untear a notch.
So I pushed the pass through the gate. That was the end of the progression.
Harpo Progressions make me laugh because they make both the Harpo and the mark look silly. When the mark doesn’t laugh at the progression, it is a sign of internal robotics, and I think that is even funnier.
Botha didn’t laugh because all he could think about was how stupid he would sound if he sent me to the Office. If he sent me to the Office for doing a progression, I would get a detention, but I always had one anyway, and Botha would look like he was failing at his job as the monitor. The monitor was supposed to know how to run the Cage and the kids inside it. The monitor was not supposed to get played like a straightman.
So he didn’t send me to the Office. He said, “You’re late for Group.”
I’d forgotten about Group. It was Tuesday. I had Group every Tuesday for half an hour before Lunch.
Let me in, then, I said.
He said, “Go around.” He pushed the pass back through the gate.
It would have been faster to go through the Cage; there was a door connecting it directly to Call-Me-Sandy’s office, and if I’d been allowed to enter the Cage, I could have walked a straight line to Group. Since he wouldn’t let me in, I had to walk C-Hall down to 2-Hall, then walk across 2-Hall to B-Hall, and walk up B-Hall for the same amount of steps that I walked down C-Hall to get to 2-Hall. It would take at least an extra minute to get to Sandy’s B-hall entrance. Botha knew it would, and he made me go around to punish me. He thought that because it was important to him that everyone got everywhere on time, it was important to me to be on time. But it was only important to him. I liked walking in the hallways. Especially by myself. And why would anyone rather go in the Cage?
But what was the most dumont about what Botha did was how he said “You’re late for Group” to me, like it mattered, like it was something to be concerned about, and how then he did the only small robot thing he could to make me even later to Group. My mom would call this passive-aggressive behavior. PAB. She’d also call certain forms of laughter PAB. She’d say that Harpo Progressions of Defiance were PAB, too, but then she’d laugh when I’d tell her about the progressions I performed at school. So would my dad. They always laughed at the same things. Except Woody Allen. On one of their first dates, they rented Broadway Danny Rose and nearly broke up. Even over a decade later, my dad still shivered when he recalled it. He described the experience as being “a little bit less fun, perhaps, than chain-smoking for ninety minutes while handcuffed to a dowager with asthma who used to teach Health and smells incontinent.”
“What do you think is so funny about this nebach?” my mother would shout from the kitchen whenever my dad and I watched Woody Allen. We would turn down the volume, but she’d come into the living room anyway, then enumerate the qualities that made Woody Allen a nebach. He was weak and ugly, defective and ineffective and far less clever than he thought, plus cowering and phlegm-complected and proud of it. Ineffective? I would sometimes ask her. And she would tell me to just stay out of it and not smartperson at her. Woody Allen was her Desormie.
For my dad, though, Woody Allen made the top five, behind Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, ahead of Larry David and Richard Pryor. My dad’s top five was the same as Nakamook’s, and, in both cases, Sacha Baron Cohen was encroaching on either Pryor or David, but he had yet to prove his longevity, and neither my father nor Benji wanted to jinx him by declaiming his genius too early. I told my dad that once at dinner — about him and Benji having the same top five — but he wasn’t impressed. He said, “What about the Beatles? Does he also enjoy the music of the Beatles, your Benji? Does he, like I, your mom, and Charles Manson—”
You’ve never even met him, I said to my dad.
“I don’t need to,” he said.
He’s my best friend, I said.
“You’ll see,” he said. “You’re already outgrowing him.”
The thing about my father was he wasn’t some kind of schmucky condescender who liked to act like he knew you better than you did; he was genuinely worried about my friendship with Benji. And the thing about Benji was that he was my best friend. So I was in this position, this suck position, where if I kept defending Benji my father would only worry more about our friendship, but if I quit defending Benji, then maybe that would mean that my father was right about our friendship since what kind of best friend doesn’t defend his best friend against his father’s assertions that their friendship is weak? I tried to break my fingers but my fingers wouldn’t break.
My mom said to stop it. She had met Benji — a few nights earlier he’d eaten at our house, but my dad was working late at the office — and she liked him too, despite the new strike against him for liking Woody Allen. “This Benji is a loyal friend,” she told my dad. “And also intelligent. Very perceptive.”
She’d asked Benji what he thought of the students in the Cage, and he’d told her, “You don’t have to worry, Mrs. Maccabee. Gurion’s able to take care of himself, and most kids know that, and the ones who aren’t sure — they know that I’ll avenge any offense against his person.” He’d said that with half a mouthful of kufta, and it had sounded less kenobi than it looks written down.
“This is not a bad kind of friend to have, Judah.”
My dad kept his eyes down, sawed at his steak = “I’m dropping this subject.”
So I dropped it also, even though I’d wanted to say more about Benji because they didn’t just share the same top five comedians, he and my father, but both cited the same Woody Allen scene as their favorite (the one in Annie Hall where Alvie gets arrested after crashing his car). And as for Harpo Progressions — which my dad, unlike my mom, loved with no reservations — Nakamook was the champion. He had performed the only epic one that I had ever heard of. It was, in fact, by way of that progression that Benji and I became best friends. The whole thing lasted nearly two weeks and was performed on Monitor Botha, who was bald.
The baldness of Botha was the kind where the hair that remains rims the head like the seat on a public toilet. As did pretty much every other man in the world who’d balded similar while being a shmendrick, Botha grew the upper part of one side long and greased its strands flat across his sticky-looking pate. I still have a hard time understanding why men do that. Forgetting that the hairstyle doesn’t fool anyone, ignoring that it highlights what it’s meant to hide, the hairstyle’s name—combover—is in the same class of words as unibrow and needlenose and muffintop and trampstamp, i.e., not only does the name mock the thing it refers to, but it’s the only name there is for the thing it refers to. So any speaker of English old enough to sport a combover has to be aware of what it is called, and thereby aware that electing to do what he does each morning in front of his mirror invites disdain. One time after school, I said so to Flowers, and he offered the opinion that men who sported combovers had most likely been doing so since before the word combover gained all its prominence; that although in the course of the preceding few years these men couldn’t have avoided hearing the word and knowing the shmendiness that it connoted, a confused kind of pride kept them from changing hairstyles. Like those kids who when you tell them their foot-taps annoy you and then in response they tap faster and harder, these men kept their combovers intact to save face.