Adam Levin - The Instructions

“You know, you’re really socially stunted sometimes,” Samuel told him.

“You’re always saying that, and I never know why.”

“Right. Exactly. Tell him you’re his best friend, already.”

“Why don’t you tell him?”

“He already knows I am, Stunted Stuntedy.”

“I am, too, Gurion,” Emmanuel said.

And I saw that it was good.

We went to Assembly in the multipurpose room together, to line up behind our teachers and pray and be counted.

Territory

No Chicagoland junglegym could beat Schechter’s bigtoy. The bigtoy’s creator, except for (years later) Philip Roth, is the only person I ever wrote a fan letter. Unlike Philip Roth, who thought I was a prankster, ********the bigtoy’s creator was dead. I didn’t find that out til I’d written the letter, though.

How I found out was I approached Headmaster Unger to acquire the creator’s name and address, and Unger told me he couldn’t remember the man’s name, but he knew he was dead, that he’d died on Schechter’s campus on a summer’s day in ’97 or ’98 while overseeing the bigtoy’s construction, but that if I wanted, he (Unger) could look through some receipts to find the name of the man’s company, and from there I could look the name up in the yellow pages and find the company’s address. I asked Unger why he thought I would be interested in something like that, and he told me that although he hadn’t seen the letter I’d written, he knew I must have put effort into writing the letter, and he thought I would prefer not to waste the effort. I still didn’t understand, and I said so. Unger said he was thinking I could send the letter to the creator’s construction company. But the letter, I told him, wasn’t written to the creator’s construction company; it was written to the creator, and I didn’t get why anyone would deliberately send a letter to someone to whom that letter wasn’t written. “So as not to waste effort,” Unger snapped at me. But the effort was already wasted, I told him. Since the letter wasn’t written to the company, to send the letter to the company would just waste more effort: the effort of looking up the address in the yellow pages, the effort of writing it on the envelope, of printing the letter out, of affixing the stamp, and not least of all the effort of whoever in the company would read this letter which didn’t concern him or anyone else at the company still living.

Unger, though able to muffle the contemptous hrumph that his nose made, seemed unable to silence it entirely, and I got the sense that we’d been having a metaphorical kind of conversation without my knowing it, and that I’d insulted him somehow, but at the same time I didn’t feel bad about insulting him, if that’s what I’d done, because that nose-noise — especially because he seemed to have purposely failed at silencing it (how hard is it to hold back a hrumph ?) as if to indicate that the place from which he just realized he had to condescend to me was so many miles high that he couldn’t, despite all his efforts, even pretend to get fully down to my level — indicated, if nothing else, that his was an M.O. of total penility. If he hadn’t made that noise, I probably would have eventually taken the name of the company from him, and even sent the letter, all the while trusting that Unger’s being an elder of mine granted him access to an understanding of the world that I did not yet have. Instead, I thanked him and returned to lunch.

It might be better that the bigtoy’s creator never read that letter anyway. Having recently reread it myself, I see now how it would’ve been possible, even likely, for the creator to misconstrue my sincere praise as backhanded. It would’ve all depended on what kind of guy he was. The attribute the letter claimed to be most important — the one that made the bigtoy great — was not, I don’t think, an attribute the creator even knew about, much less one he intentionally designed.

Although it’s true a slide descended from each corner of the bigtoy’s platform, and true that all four of these slides were fast, it wasn’t the number of slides or their speed that rendered the bigtoy superlative. And while the 7' x 8' wackywall intersecting the eastern side of the platform had footholds and grips spaced perfect for climbertag, it wasn’t the wackywall either. Neither was it the monkeybar dome that rose ten feet above the platform’s safety railing. Nor the seemingly dangerous wood-and-wire bridge off the platform’s south side, which led to the old castle-themed junglegym (the smalltoy) and creaked loud in the cold and would bounce like a waveform if just two big kids jumped hard and no one else was on it. And certainly the yellow ropenet that sagged between the platform’s north side and four ground-anchors seven feet away was a remarkable achievement in itself — twice as remarkable when you noticed the skewed grey grid of shadow it left on the pebbles, and three times so if you ever saw that shadow go bendy during storms — but remarkable as the ropenet was, even it paled beside the true source of the bigtoy’s superlativeness. All of these aspects combined did. It was not the sum of the bigtoy’s parts that made the bigtoy superlative, but the difference between that sum and the portion of the universe containing it. It was what the bigtoy surrounded.

With the possible exception of certain eighth-grade girls (their preference for the swingset had always seemed fake), everyone’s favorite part of the playground was the territory ceilinged by the bigtoy’s platform. Five steel poles that were set in cement held the platform level seven feet above the earth. The platform’s gapless planks, rubberized for traction, kept the territory dry in the rain and the snow, and the shade it provided was thorough enough to make everything it covered look blue. This shade, in the morning, was perfectly square-shaped. To slapslap within it — especially when other kids were gathered outside it — made you feel like a performer in a reverse-lit arena. And it wasn’t just the best spot at Schechter to slapslap. It was the best spot at Schechter to do nearly anything. Gossip you heard there always seemed urgent, and secrets you told completely secure. The baseball-card kids would go there to trade. The handheld kids would crouch there and game. If you cried with your back pressed to one of the poles, your sobs would leave your throat so heavy and loud that by the time you slid down to sit in the pebbles, your palms on your cheeks, your fingers all gooey, you’d know you’d never cry about the same thing again. After every school-dance, some couple firstkissed there. It was where you would meet to share cigarettes on weekends. At night, it was said, teens went there to drink, to lay in the pebbles and go to third base. So if you wanted a spot there before the first bell, you had to rise early, rain or shine. No more than nine kids could fit uncrammed within the boundaries. No more than six if you wanted to slapslap.

Everyone wanted to slapslap.

Overthrow

It was from under the bigtoy that we’d end the reign of simple, me and Emmanuel and Samuel Diamond. On my second Monday at Schechter — August 27, 2001—our plan got formed during lunch:

First we made a pact that we wouldn’t simple slapslap, not with each other or anyone else. Second, we’d take the territory every morning. The schoolday began at 8:30, so at 7:25 I’d meet Emmanuel and Samuel at Rosemont and Artesian, and if the weather was nice we’d walk the twelve blocks, and if it was lousy we’d ride the bus. Either way we’d get to school by five to eight, beating the earliest early-morning regulars by at least ten minutes, and we’d get under the bigtoy and slapslap. There’d be room enough for three more kids. If not the best simple slapslappers at school, we knew they’d be some of the most die-hard; they’d have had to rise extra early to get their spots, too.