Adam Levin - The Instructions

“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.

It was news to me that combover ever lacked prominence — it seemed so obviously to be the right word — but Flowers paid endless attention to words so I came to believe him, plus the motive he’d described for men sporting combovers seemed to be right for Monitor Botha, who was always trickling. Regardless of the motives behind Botha’s overcombing, though, you’d think he’d be one of the last guys in the world to make fun of some underweight troubled kid’s hair. At least that’s what I’d have thought.

But Egon Marsh — his dad awaiting trial on charges of child-porn that Egon, of course, was rumored to have starred in; his older brother a tweeker, freshly kicked out of Stevenson High School for possession; his sister Mia autistic, also probably retarded, the only kid in the Cage who never once got stepped (I learned all of this a few weeks later from Benji, maybe three or four days after his epic progression ended, by which time Egon and Mia had both been removed from Aptakisic, removed from the town in which they’d grown up, removed from the custody of their suicidal mother who then committed suicide; all of the rest of Aptakisic, however, had known about Egon’s family for a while) — Egon Marsh was one skinny, troubled kid, and Botha made fun of his hair three times. At least three times. The three times I saw were on my first day at Aptakisic — the Tuesday following Labor Day weekend — and for all I knew, Botha’d picked on Egon before then, too.

I didn’t even know he was doing it til the third time. The first time, he sniffed at the air and he said, “Something smells rape in here!” And that was true. Something did smell ripe, and it was Egon’s hair, which was matted and oily and flecked with white bits. He was sitting right next to me, and Botha, at the time he announced that something smelled ripe, was standing a few feet away from our carrels, and because I was new, and I didn’t know Botha, and because I couldn’t imagine a teacher could be such a dickhead to a kid so openly, I figured he was genuinely puzzled by the source of the smell, and I remember I was worried that he and everyone else might think the smell was coming from me. Short of saying that the smell was Egon’s — which I wasn’t willing to do — I wasn’t able to figure out a way to make it clear it wasn’t mine til after the moment had already passed.

Then a couple minutes later, Botha returned. He did this thing where he acted like a happy bloodhound, sniffing at the air along the trail from his desk to our carrels. This time he said, “Something smells downright bleddy Marshy. ” This got laughs from some of the students, and I got more worried they’d think I was the stinker — I didn’t get the joke; I didn’t know Egon’s name; I figured that Marshy must have been lower-cased, and that it was either Australian or Aptakisical vernacular for foul or gross —and I still thought Botha sincerely didn’t know the source of the smell, and I knew that I sincerely didn’t want to start my career at Aptakisic as the kid who smells, so in order to make it clear that the stink wasn’t mine, that it would stay if I left and that it wouldn’t follow me, I broke off the tip of the pencil I was using and asked for permission to go to the sharpener, which was fixed to the opposite wall of the Cage. Botha told me that normally he’d give me a step for talking without raising my hand first, but since this was my first day, he’d let the whole thing slide, just this once, if I would raise my hand, wait to get called on, and then ask properly. That Botha might be actively trying to humiliate me didn’t seem any more likely to me than did the possibility that he was purposely being a dickhead to Egon — I assumed the rules were really important to him, and that he was worried I didn’t understand them — so I did as suggested. I raised my hand and got called on and I asked for permission.