Adam Levin - The Instructions

And inflicting blindness on the vandal would not be an extreme reaction like my father told me it would during Shmidt vs Skokie, when a vandal wrote “jewhater” on our garage door and the squadcar got called against my protests, for how much simpler would it be to take the King-Middle Brick of My False Accusation from my Relics Lockbox and just drop it on the head of the vandal? My bedroom window overlooked our front stoop, and it was surely easier to drop a brick accurately on a head than to get a pair of pennies into a pair of eyes from the same distance as you’d drop the brick. And a dropped brick would kill the vandal, or at least leave him retarded, and that was far harsher a punishment than blindness, and to exercise a gentler option when a harsher one was more readily available was to exercise restraint, and that was the opposite of being extreme.

Before going inside, I pushed the WELCOME mat on top of the graffito, then went back down the steps and placed five pairs of pebbles at twelve-inch intervals along the walk-up.

When I got to my room, I took a pennygun and some pennies from my Armaments Lockbox and set my deskchair at the open window. Kneeling on the chair, I nailed the first seven pebbles in consecutive projections, missed the eighth, hit the last two, and then tried for the one I missed and missed it again. It was weird to miss the same pebble twice. I got it the third time. The whole thing took fifty-three seconds.

After retrieving the pennies and the eighth pebble from the walk-up, I returned to my room and turned my computer on. While the OS loaded, I pulled all my lockboxes from under my bed. I dropped the eighth pebble into the Relics Lockbox. Into the Documents Lockbox, I filed the paper-bag plate with my love declaration in the Aptakisic manila, and then I unfolded and filed the note I’d tossed with Eliyahu of Brooklyn right next to the manila, but when I got my School Record out of my bag, I could see that there wasn’t enough room for even one of the two folders.

I had known that this problem would eventually come up — my lockboxes were only half the size of banker’s boxes and I kept on making and finding documents — and I’d decided weeks before that when the time came I’d consolidate my Armaments Lockbox with my Relics Lockbox and put some of the documents from the Documents Lockbox into the former Armaments Lockbox, except I’d thought I had at least another few months before I’d have to come up with an organizing principle that determined which documents went into which box, and now I had to come up with one immediately.

I sat there and tried and I couldn’t come up with one. I kept getting distracted, thinking about the vandal, and Emmanuel on the el talking strife in Israel and rumors about me, and poor Ben-Wa Wolf, and Israelite Shovers, how to start my new scripture, and Slokum on the bus, and how I had trickled and how I had caulked. Plus I was starving. It was like I never even ate that slice of pizza. The sound of my thoughts was whiny, too, like “Plus I was meowmeow. It was like I meowmoew even meow that slice of meowmeow.”

I punched my desk on the fake copper mailslot — my desktop used to be our front door — and it dented in the middle, but I didn’t feel better, I felt even worse, that desk was important, a gift from my father, I felt like a jerk, I meow like a meow, and then the chime chimed, the hopeful new-mail chime, I opened my inbox, found stuff off listservs, got disappointed, but what was I expecting? something from June? vandal fucken vandal, vandal at the threshold, consolidate the lockbox you’ll get the vandal later, it was time to stop whining, to get something done, something simple that functioned, something that worked. I wrote Rabbi Salt:

Sent: November 14, 2006, 6:49 PM Central-Standard Time

Subject: Updated List Please?

From: Gurionforever@yahoo.com (me)

To: avelsalt@hotmail.com (Avel Salt, Solomon Schechter School)

Rabbi Salt,

I was hoping you could send me an updated list of email addresses of Schechter students, both former and current — mine’s from last year.

Your Student,

Gurion ben-Judah

I thought I heard the back door open, but decided to ignore it. Something about typing the words “Your student, Gurion ben-Judah,” cleared my head a little, so I typed the words another ten times. Then I deleted all of them but one and sent the email. I still didn’t have an organizing principle for my documents, but I saw I might as well consolidate the relics and armaments. The consolidation was a cinch. (Except for the bells of a couple pennyguns, the Armaments Lockbox didn’t contain anything that could get crushed too easily — there were washers, some coins, a bunch of wingnuts, and a very primitive, however effective mace that I’d made by wrapping a fist-sized ball of penny-laden duct tape around a doubled-over bootlace — and apart from the eighth pebble, the Relics Lockbox only held my passport, my broken water-resistant watch, an envelope with a cut-off dreadlock that had formed in the middle of my head after I’d refused to let my mom brush my hair for a week one time when I was four, the King-Middle Brick of My False Accusation, and some teeth I’d lost.) All I had to do was remove the pennyguns, dump the Armaments Lockbox into the Relics Lockbox, then put the pennyguns on top, lock the box down and call it my Relics & Armaments Lockbox.

Performing the consolidation completely un-D’d my A, and I came up with an organizing principle that was so easy and simple it embarrassed me to think how the problem had gotten me explosive enough to dent my mailslot:

The original Documents Lockbox would become my Documents By Or About Gurion Lockbox, and it would contain all my emails and letters, my school record (minus, for the moment, Call-Me-Sandy’s Assessment and Rabbi Salt’s letter to Brodsky, which I set aside to read in ISS the next day), the original copy of Ulpan , the scripture that Flowers had been redpenning, the scripture that I told Flowers I’d start that evening (once I started it), and The Story of Stories .

The former Armaments Lockbox became my Other Documents Lockbox, and that is where I put the hand-to-hand combat manual my Grandfather Malchizedek wrote for the IDF; an upublished manuscript my father wrote at yeshiva called Justice in Samuel I ; my mom’s doctoral dissertation, The Creation and Utilization of “Accidental” Contingencies in Diadic Behavioral Modication Therap y; and her galley-proofs of New Directions in Functional Analytic Psychotherapy , which was about to be published by University of Chicago Press.

I’d just gotten all the documents into their boxes when I heard my mom yelling up the stairway.

“Gurion, bavakasha boy .” (Please come here!)

A “please” from my mother, especially a Hebrew “please,” is its own exclamation point. Probably she’d been calling me for a while and I hadn’t heard her.

Five minutes! I shouted.

I wanted to fix my desk’s mailslot before going downstairs. My dad built the desk when I was five, after my parents got an addition on the house. He told me he’d had a frontdoor desk at yeshiva just like it, and I thought it was the nicest present, and that it was important that he wanted me to have the same kind of desk that he used to have, and now I’d damaged it with my fist like a real schmuck. I could pound the dent out later, but if I didn’t start the fix — if I didn’t at least find my screwdriver and take the lid off its brackets — I’d have too much sadness to eat dinner across the table from him.

“Now!” my mom shouted.