“I’m not like Botha,” he said.
Not exactly, I said. You’re more scared. I said, I’d have to actually hit Botha to put him down.
Call-Me-Sandy said, “Gurion, this isn’t productive. Please sit.”
I sat. What I want to know, I said to Call-Me-Sandy, is why the Janitor isn’t helping Ronrico up. Because Ronrico is the Janitor’s best friend. Ronrico got his ass kicked in the locker-room for the Janitor. I know that because I’m the one who kicked it. And it was very easy for me, but shouldn’t the Janitor help him up, Sandy? Don’t you think that’s right?
“Mikey?” Call-Me-Sandy said to the Janitor, “Can you tell Gurion why you won’t help Ronrico to stand up?”
“You strike with a fury,” Main Man said to me, “and maybe you are out of control. People are afraid of you.”
I said, Why do you say that, Scott? Are you afraid of me?
Main Man said, “A little bit.”
It made me depressed for a second. Call-Me-Sandy saw it. I saw her lean forward. She wanted to make a moment of it. She always wanted to make a moment when Scott said something to me about feelings, but I stopped her.
I said to Scott, I protect you, though. I’ll always protect you.
I said to the Janitor, Help your friend up. I’m not gonna hurt you. Just be a good guy.
The Janitor said, “What if you chop my neck? I don’t want you to chop my neck.”
I said, I wouldn’t chop your neck like that. Why would I chop your neck for helping your friend? That’s stupid.
“Do you promise?” said the Janitor.
I said, I don’t promise. You know I don’t promise. If you promise it means that every time you don’t promise it’s okay for you to be lying. I won’t chop your neck. Have faith in my word.
“I need you to promise.”
I said, I’ll chop your neck if you don’t help him up.
The Janitor pulled his sleeve down over his hand and started helping his friend up.
Ronrico said “Thigh!” to the Janitor.
Vincie’s hand went to his eye. The Janitor let go of Ronrico’s hand and dropped Ronrico so Ronrico fell on his own wrists. Vincie’s hand went to his eye again. The Janitor held one hand in the other and squeezed. Ronrico sat up and shook his hands out like they were asleep. Sandy’s hands were over her mouth. The thumbs of Main Man’s hands were in his mouth. Jelly was flicking everyone off with both hands. Mangey was scratching drylegs with hers. Leevon sat on his. I didn’t know what to do with mine, but I had to do something, so I dug the right one under the rubberband around the left one, twisted my wrists twice, and stretched them apart, far and fast, and the rubberband handcuffs snapped in the middle. It did not make a loud-enough sound.
I said to Scott: Mookus, you have released me from my bondage!
Scott took his thumbs out of his mouth. He said, “I have released you!”
“Bondage,” Call-Me-Sandy said. She was so nervous. You could tell from how she kept pushing her fingers through the buttonholes of her cardigan. I wished she wasn’t so nervous. She was actually a very kind person, Sandy. “Bondage is a curious word,” she said. And you could see from her faces that she was best friends with her sisters and had proud parents who used to buy her ice cream and stickers for her sticker-book whenever she brought home an A on a test or even a quiz, which happened a lot, because she was also very smart. Call-Me-Sandy was going to the University of Chicago for graduate school like my dad and mom had, but for social work instead of law or psychology, and you had to be smart to go there. Still, she was no good at what she did. When we got loud or wild or said unkind things, she thought it meant that she was doing something wrong and it worried her and she got scared and tried to arrange us with her calm voice that shook and it made us louder and wilder and more unkind. She said, “Does everyone in the group know what bondage means?”
Jenny Mangey stopped scratching and sat up really straight. “It’s a kind of leather,” she said.
“It’s a kind of sex,” said Ronrico Asparagus. He got back in his chair.
“Fucking,” said Vincie.
“Same thing,” said Ronrico.
Vincie disagreed. He said, “Sex is what you do with your wife. Fucking is what you do to your mistress. You don’t make your wife wear leather, and that’s why bondage is a kind of fucking.”
“What the fuck?” said the Janitor. “I fucking want a fucking tissue.”
I said, Bondage is slavery.
“My mom doesn’t fuck,” Jenny Mangey said.
I said, And bondage is this school, but invisibly.
Jelly said, “No one said your mom fucks, Mange.”
The Janitor said, “Fuck this fucking school.”
It’s the arrangement, I said. Bondage is rules you are too scared to break.
“My mom is not a fucker,” said Jenny Mangey.
Vincie said, “No one said your mom’s a fucker.”
We were talking so fast Sandy couldn’t break in because it would be disrespectful. She would have had to break the rules to break in. She was supposed to keep us under control by showing us what control looked like and it was supposed to look like control was being able to follow the rules, but all the rules did was freeze her voice and spaz her fingers around in her buttonholes. It was proof that the arrangement was a kind of bondage.
Jenny said, “My mom wears bondage leather.”
“Then she is a fucker after all,” Vincie said.
Jenny said, “That’s what I said you said.”
“I didn’t say it til you did,” Vincie said. “You’re the one who said it, Mangey. If you’re not ready to say something, don’t say it.”
“You have to accept the consequences of what you say,” Ronrico said.
I said, You are a slave, Asparagus.
“A slave with pee so pungent,” said Jelly.
The Janitor said, “The consequences are fucked. I fucking hate the consequences.”
I said, I hate them too.
The Janitor looked at me, and he didn’t look scared, and he kept on looking at me. And then I noticed that everyone was looking at me, even the ones who were crying. We were all angry at the same thing. We always had been. And I felt just like I used to feel during Torah Study at Schechter: like everyone was waiting for me to teach something. Like they weren’t really looking at me, but looking to me. It was my second-favorite feeling. Before June kissed me in the Office, it had been my first-favorite feeling, and my second favorite, which became my third after I’d been kissed, was the one that would come when I performed the awaited teaching. My ex-third-favorite that became fourth was the feeling I’d get when someone else threw the first punch in a fight and I became undeniably justified. Fifth was the explosion that followed. The order of sixth (ex-fifth) through thirteenth (now fourteenth) favorites switched around day to day, but it included the feelings I’d get when I heard Mookus sing; when Nakamook admired how I fought; when Vincie noticed he was smart; when my dad lit a cigarette while high-speed merging onto Lower Wacker with only one finger on the steering wheel; when Flowers would tell me that my latest chapter made him want to read the next one; when my mom cursed in Arabic in the middle of laughing at a new kind of joke I’d invented; when I’d meet a tough Israelite; when Rabbi Salt wrote down what I’d say to him; and whenever a thing that was breaking made a sound I hadn’t heard before.
But this time was the first time I had the second-favorite feeling at Aptakisic, and also the first time, ever, that I had trouble doing what was needed to have the third; except for Jelly, who never went to Hebrew School anyway, no one in Group was an Israelite. They might have been like Hashemites or Druzes, like Nakamook and Flowers — even the ones I thought were like Canaanites and Romans before, like Ronrico and the Janitor — but still they did not know Torah, so I could not teach them Torah, let alone Talmud, and I did not want to make things up.