Adam Levin - The Instructions

“If you are angry at me,” my mother said to my father, “please do not be coy about it.”

He slid his knife beneath the skin of a breast and sawed and pried til the skin came off in one piece, and then he set it on my plate. I liked the skin when it crackled. This skin flapped. I poked it. My dad said, “That was not coyness, Tamar. That was a question: Why is it I’m not told my own son is getting into fights at his new school?”

My mom pulled her plate back onto the placemat to fork meat, but dropped the fork and said “Uch,” and touched her eyes to make sure they were still there, and put her hands in her lap to stop checking on her eyes. Then she said, “If there was something for you to be concerned about, I would have told you. The fighting is normal.”

“It is not normal,” my father said to her. “Do not tell him it is normal. It is not normal to fight,” he said to me. “You are surrounded by delinquents and idiots. They’re the ones for whom it’s normal, and what’s normal for delinquents and idiots is what? Is delinquent. Idiotic.”

“They start up with him, Judah,” my mother said. “He should be picked on?”

“Are you picked on?” my father said.

I said, Not exactly. I said, People start up with me, though.

“They started up with you today?” he said.

I said, Kind of. I said, I towel-snapped the neck of this one boy the Janitor and he called me a name.

“Why did you towel-snap his neck ?”

There wasn’t exactly a reason, I said, but he wasn’t a nice kid. Him and his brother used to make fun of Scott Mookus. I don’t think he’ll do that anymore, though. We’re friends now. But after I towel-snapped his neck, he said I smelled and was a B.D., so I towel-snapped his eyes and spit on his foot. That’s when his friend Ronrico charleyhorsed me from behind and kicked me in the ribs.

“You see?” my mother said. “It was just some snaps of towel, and then the second boy came.”

“The second boy,” said my father, “came to protect his friend from our son.”

I said, That’s not true. I said, He came to avenge his friend. It wasn’t protection. I wasn’t fighting the Janitor anymore — he wasn’t getting up.

“The second boy came from behind , Judah,” said my mother.

Yes he did, I said.

My mom said, “And what did you do?”

I loved my mom. She was always so interested.

I said, “I landed a glancing blow on his face.”

“This ended it?” she said.

My father exhaled loudly, made a fist around his chin = “I will wait this out, and you will both be aware that I am waiting.”

The blow pushed him back, I said, but he wasn’t out, and this crowd that was watching kept growing, so I grabbed the padlock off my locker.

“You did not,” said my mom.

I did, I said. I said, And I hooked the ring around a knuckle and blasted that kid’s lungs out with a blow to the solarplexus just before he would’ve knocked me over.

“Gurion!” my mother said.

He bent like he was praying, and I swept his legs, I said. When he went down, he hit all these metal baskets and it was so noisy everyone backed off, Ema. They were gonna crowd me up more, I knew it, but they backed off because of the noise and how the padlock gleamed.

“You are very smart,” she said.

“What the fuck are you telling him?” my father said.

In almost all of the books I have ever read, and many of the movies I’ve seen, when a husband curses at a wife, or a wife at a husband, it signals that they are fighting. That was not true about my parents, though. My parents were often a little bit explosive, always very loud, and when they’d curse it was usually with joy. When it seemed like they were fighting, they were usually playing. The loudness was fun for them. The back-and-forth way they’d become outraged with each other was a contest like the name-calling game that I’d play with Jelly during Group; neither one cared to win, they only tried to make the contest last. It is true, though, that when the subject of the outrage contest was Gurion, it would become a fight as often as not.

You could tell a fight from a contest by what they’d do with their bodies. During contests, they would touch each other, usually with pinches and gentle thumb-stabs, and they’d always look at each other’s faces when they were talking, like to say, “What then! What!” When they’d fight, though, they didn’t look at each other much, and instead of touching, they’d use a prop — usually a cigarette, sometimes an eating utensil — to occupy their hands, and their voices would become quieter. The problem was that most of their fights would start out as outrage contests, and even though the body-indicators made it pretty easy to tell the difference between a fight and an outrage contest, I had never been able to figure out what caused an outrage contest to become a fight. I knew it wasn’t cursing, though, so I didn’t get upset when my father said, “What the fuck are you telling him?” and then my mom said, “And why the fuck do you yell?”

“He hits a boy with a padlock and you call it smart!” said my father.

“That boy hurt our son, and there is no boy who saw it happen that will ever fuck with our son again, Foulmouth.”

“Unless our son fucks with another boy, himself, Toughguy, in which case that boy will have long since known to carry a weapon to defend himself against Gurion Maccabee because Gurion Maccabee is a crazed lunatic.” He said to me, “You’re not a crazed lunatic, but you are acting like one, and eventually you’ll be treated like one, and even if you were one, I would love you because you’re my son, and I would never want you to get beat up either, but this is not the way to act, the way you have acted, you are smarter than this, and you will act like a mensch, not a Philistine, you will use your gifts to avoid fights, not to start them — there are other ways to win.”

I said, That’s why I do Harpo Progressions. I said, I did one just today. To Mr. Botha.

That was excellent timing, for me to mention the progression right then. My father made his bottom lip fat and leaned at me. “Nu?” he said, faking impatience.

I said, Remember I told you about the protocol for getting in the Cage? With the passes and the clipboard?

“The gate, and the locks, yes yes go on.”

I was coming back from Brodsky’s office, I said, and Botha told me to hand him my pass like I didn’t know that I was supposed to hand it to him, like I hadn’t done that a hundred times already, and so I folded it before I handed it to him.

“He gave it back?” said my father.

He wouldn’t even take it, I said. I said, He told me to unfold it.

My father slapped the table and said, “Ha! Bureaucratic robot mamzer. So what? So you unfolded it, you refolded it…”

Yes, I said, and then I dropped it and he told me pick it up, and I picked it up and crumpled it, and—

“Get to the point,” my mother said. “This story does not entertain me.”

You think it’s hilarious, I said. I said, You’re looking down at the placemat’s dandelions to hide your face, but the corners of your mouth are crosshatching the rays off the corners of your eyes is how big you’re smiling.

My dad jabbed his pointer at my mom.

I said, I had to do something to the pass that couldn’t be undone because that was the only way to win, was to do something permanent. So I tore it in four places, and that’s how I won.

“Now that is smart,” my father said. “You used your head.”

“To what end was his head used?” my mother said. “What do you think you encourage?”