“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.