Adam Levin - The Instructions

No one called her Eliza. They all called her June. I’d seen June around, but never close up. She was flat but so pretty. She sat before I did, and not in the middle chair. I didn’t know if I should sit next to her or sit so a chair was empty between us, so I tried to read her face, but I couldn’t read her face because she wasn’t bat-mitzvah yet — the stories wouldn’t tell. They weren’t available.

I did a quick eenie-meenie with my chin and the words inside my head so no one would know. I landed on sit with the chair between us , then knew I didn’t want that, so I sat down next to her and asked why she was there. She said she was there for talking in Spanish.

I said, That’s racist.

June said, “Spanish. Class.” There were three slim gaps between the teeth of her top-row. She whispered, “Next stop, Frontier Motel.”

“Next stop, Frontier Motel,” was the first part of a rhyme people said to me on the bus, right before I’d get dropped off at the Frontier Motel. The rest of the rhyme was, “The place where Gurion’s fat black dad who fell dwells.” They thought I lived at the Frontier Motel, but I only got picked up and dropped off there.

I never knew what to do when I’d hear the rhyme because the guy they called my black dad was the motel owner, Flowers, a three-hundred-pound bachelor hoodooman with silvershot dreadlocks and a chrome-knobbed walking cane who’d written four novels he said cast spells. He said I shouldn’t read them; not because of the spells, but because he was my teacher, and his books would interfere. So I didn’t read them, because he was my teacher, and my father’s old friend. He was helping me to write my third work of scripture. I.e., he was helping me out with this work of scripture, The Instructions , although, at the time, I hadn’t known its title, let alone its true substance. At the time, all I’d known was that it would be different from my first two scriptures— The Story of Stories and Ulpan— which I hadn’t needed help with from anyone at all, since they were exclusively concerned with my people, who I already knew how to speak to and about. My people, when I’d written those first two scriptures, were the only people I knew.

Apart from forbidding me to read his four novels, though, the only thing Flowers ever forbade was for me to portray him as a wise old black man who gave life-lessons to an Israelite boy, part lost-tribe or not, because, he said, that would signify wrong, and signifying was important to him, and since he wasn’t some kind of zealous forbidder, I knew it should be important to me. And that was the reason I didn’t know what to do when people called him my black dad who fell. The first thing I’d think to do was violence, because they were making fun of him, but if I did violence then they could think I was doing violence because they called a black guy my dad and that it made me ashamed. So violence would signify wrong. Plus I didn’t know who they were exactly — just that they sat up front with the bandkids. They might have even been the bandkids. So I didn’t do anything to them at all. Instead, I’d tell Flowers and he’d give me a book that was by someone else, or sometimes a root he’d tell me to chew. The roots all tasted like chalk.

June didn’t say the black guy part of the bus-rhyme, but I was being nice to her, so it was suck of her to say any of it. I didn’t even know how she knew the rhyme — she wasn’t on my bus. She sneezed after she said it, though, and after she sneezed, I said God bless you. I didn’t really want to be mean to her anyway.

Desormie kept trying to talk to Miss Pinge while she typed. “So,” he said.

Miss Pinge shrugged = “So what?”

He said, “I guess you’re recording attendance.”

Miss Pinge nodded = “Yes already.”

“I see you’ve got a system,” Desormie said. “You just sorta bring up the name of an absent kid on your spreadsheet, there — Oh! Look at that. You don’t even have to type the whole name in. You just sorta type the first couple letters of the last name and then there’s like a box pops up you can select from… I see, sometimes it’s quicker to just type the whole name in so you don’t have to move your hand off the home-row of the keyboard there to use the mouse or the arrow-pad. There’s a coupla systems there, huh? There’s the system you’re using, like in the computer, and then there’s the system you’re using of your own. If the kid’s last name is Yamowitz — wow, you’re already in the Y’s and it’s barely third period. As I was saying, if the kid’s name is Yamowitz — and what a crappy name! — I see you just sorta type in Y A and hit enter cause there aren’t any other kids with last names start with Y A in the box and you know that so you just hit enter and there’s the kid’s file, and then you hit shift-A. Absent! On the record. There you go. I can respect your system. I do respect your system. I am Luca Brasi and you are Don Vito Corleone and I am at your daughter’s wedding and your daughter’s wedding is the system you’re using. I like it. You know what I mean?”

I thought: If history’s taught us anything, it’s that any man can be killed.

That’s from Part II .

Miss Pinge stopped typing and tilted her head = “ Please go away, Ron Desormie,” but Desormie thought = “Please continue, you interesting gym teacher.” He turned around and saw me watching him. Then he made his eyes wide at June and thumbed air at me = “Look at this intermittently disordered exploder who does not attend and is hyper and who thinks you want to sit next to him when what you really want is to sit in my lap.” He ran the thumb up and down his cleavage. Then he winked at June and turned back to Miss Pinge.

He said, “I bet there used to be an old system where you didn’t have those pop-up boxes and you had to type the entire name in. How fast our technology moves. Jeez. Look at all those absents.”

Miss Pinge didn’t look.

Desormie said, “What I mean is, there’s a whole lot of absents you got there.” Then he said, “Gotta teach gym.”

He pretended to scratch his arm so he could flex it, and then he left the CASS on the desk and then he left.

I hate that perv, I said to June.

She said, “Me too.”

Yeah? I said.

June made the noise “Tch” = “That was a useless thing to say, Gurion.” = “What you just asked me was not a real question.”

I said, Tch. It sounded inauthentic and I tried to ignore her.

It was hard for me to ignore people, especially pretty ones. It was hard to ignore noises, too. Call-Me-Sandy said the same thing as my mom said about it. They said that to be a good ignorer you had to concentrate on another thing because if you just concentrated on ignoring what you were supposed to ignore then you wouldn’t really be ignoring what you were supposed to ignore because you’d be thinking about ignoring it, which was just another way of thinking about it.

So I concentrated on the face of Miss Pinge instead of June. It was not as fun as concentrating on the face of June. June was pretty and also hot. Miss Pinge was hot but she wasn’t pretty. It’s the faces she made that were hot. But the face that she had when she was not making a face was not pretty. It was beat-looking, her resting face. When she was my age, she got her period early and her father dragged her in front of a mirror in her pajamas. He forced her to look into it and say, “You are an ugly girl and I hate you.” The face she made in the mirror acted powerfully on the bones and muscles of her resting face so that now it was a hint of the mirror-face. Certain kinds of men, on seeing the hint, would try to seduce her in hopes that once they’d gotten her naked, they could say something cruel to her and thereby elicit that original face she’d made for her father. Certain kinds of men like Ron Desormie. What a name. What a pervy name. What a perfect name for a perv like him. It could even be verbed like pasteurize. I thought: It could be? No. It will be. I thought: From now on, desormiate = perv the world, and rondesormiate will, for a while, be an acceptable, however overly formal, variant in the vein of irregardless , then become archaic, whereas sorm and desorm, the slang of tomorrow, will eventually dominate, rendering desormiate itself the over-formal variant.