End of the Jews

by Adam Mansbach

  She tries to support the activism—certainly, it’s better than the other outlets Tris has found for his free-floating rebellion. Didn’t she let him skip class to go see his favorite rapper give a talk at Yale, the one whose name sounds like a Star Wars robot? That was only a month ago, but Tris has already forgotten the favor.

  Linda’s problem, everybody tells her, is that she takes things personally. Tris’s failure to do his dishes, or move his shoes, after the ten-thousandth reminder? It means he doesn’t care about her, that her feelings don’t matter. Abe shakes his head, doling out some of his infinite patience, and tells his wife it’s just carelessness; he was the same way as a kid. Linda knows better. It’s a statement. Tris is informing her that she is petty, concerned with trivial bullshit, and that he refuses to lower himself to her level of care.

  Linda will fight him on this to her last breath. There is no way she’s letting her son turn out like her father, even if they do share the same name, in defiance—or, rather, total ignorance—of Jewish custom. That was mostly Abe’s idea anyway; he spent the last trimester of her pregnancy entranced by Blockbusters, the last novel Tristan had published before what the rest of the family refers to privately as the Slow Down. Twelve years separated that book from its ill-fated 1973 successor, The Organist, and now the count is sixteen and running. Linda acquiesced to Abe’s suggestion as a kind of private peace treaty with her father, who, of course, had no idea she was even upset with him.

  She will not admit it, even to Abe, but Linda cannot help feeling that Tris’s growing social conscience is a direct repudiation of her. All forms of oppression are linked, as he once said. Tris is marching against her, well equipped to fight the good fight by years of outrage, years of “It’s not fair.” Years of “Why?” He’s come to realize that the world is no different from his own life, brimming with the same injustice he’s long railed against.

  Why. The word alone now makes Linda want to shut down, fall asleep. Tris crosses his ankles, folds his arms over his chest. He might as well pitch a tent; he’s digging in. Or maybe her son feels as trapped as she does, like a lawyer—which is what he’ll surely become, a great one, if he lives that long—objecting purely for the record.

  “You know why,” she tells him.

  Beep beep.

  “I gotta go.” Tris disappears, leaving Linda to contemplate how much of her life she spends yearning for various noises, car horns and telephones and doorbells, to intercede and send the two of them stalking back to their corners like boxers at the end of a round. It is this moment, though, the one directly after the bell sounds, that Linda finds least bearable of all. In it, their conflict—which is at least honest—morphs into silent conspiracy as they prepare to face the world. How many times have the two of them wiped rage and tears from their cheeks, becoming hard new people by the time they reach the phone, the door, the car?

  She glances out the window to see who’s picking Tris up, and finds Malik Courtney’s station wagon idling in her driveway, trunk jacked open and latched with fraying twine to accommodate the two huge speakers jutting halfway out, looking as though one pothole might send them toppling into the street. A nice kid, but she doesn’t trust Malik; he’s a year older and he smells of cigarettes. She watches the two of them load the backseat full of records, record players, a mysterious small silver box that glints in the sun, then glances at her watch and smiles. It’s Saturday, twelve noon. They must be on their way to synagogue.

  RISK flicks the power strip, runs ground wires from the decks to the mixer, and clips on the battery-powered fan they hope will keep the ancient amp from overheating and cutting out, the way it did last week. He’s doing all of it as fast as possible, because Risk Zone Productions has arrived at Temple Beth Israel a scant ten minutes before they are scheduled to play, as is their trademark. Guests are already streaming into the synagogue’s huge function room, finding their seats and casting eager glances at the laden buffet tables.

  Thanks to the half blunt Zone sparked as soon as he pulled out of the driveway of 19 Algonquin Road, Risk Zone Productions is operating from beneath heavy eyelids and feeling ambivalent about the prospect of spinning for yet another gaggle of timid suit-and party dress–clad thirteen-year-olds and smug professional/parental Jewish types. As is also their trademark.

  The father of Jamie Siegel, the Bar Mitzvah Boy, turns sideways in his head-table chair, away from the lavish flower bouquet and the murmurs of proud aunts, and beams a vaguely threatening brand of concern at them across the polished parquet dance floor.

  “Okay.” RISK bends to flip through Zone’s crate, number 420, although he knows exactly what’s in it. “You brought the ‘Chicken Dance,’ right?”

  “Yeah, sure. If you’ve got the ‘Electric Slide.’”

  “Of course. Sinatra’s Greatest Hits? The Big Chill sound track?”

  “Check. ‘Brown Eyed Girl’? ‘Stairway to Heaven’?”

  “No doubt. ‘Oh, What a Night’? ‘Twist and Shout’?”

  “Naturally, homeboy.” They’re both laughing now, at their own sheer, stubborn incompetence. The Risk Zone Productions catalog consists of little beyond rap records and breakbeats, plus a few old soul joints of the Al/Marvin/Aretha variety borrowed weekly from Vanessa Courtney’s living room stereo cabinet. They’ve got none of the new Top Forty pop radio horseshit for which the Bar Mitzvah Boy and his large cadre of colleagues will surely clamor, nor a single traditional favorite. Not even the dominant rap songs of the epoch are represented: no “Wild Thing,” no “It Takes Two,” no “Supersonic.” But RISK and Zone charge $150 per bar mitzvah, and the competition asks six times that.

  The competition is Steve Goldman Productions, owned and fronted by the eponymous tuxedo-clad ex–lounge singer and staffed behind the boards by underpaid high school kids from two towns over. RISK attended about fifty Goldman parties in his thirteenth year, when everyone but him was memorizing Torah passages and Becoming A Man to the tune of major cash infusions. They are slick, corny affairs featuring smoke machines, oversized plastic sunglasses, an endless supply of neon glow sticks, and an arsenal of audience-participation games that provide the little hormone balls with a sanctioned form of boy-girl contact. Steve Goldman, moreover, plays cassettes. For this alone, the words Sucker DJ should be branded across his forehead with a white-hot iron.

  “Sweet! I was hoping it’d be you guys.” RISK looks up from the wires he’s dejumbling to see Zone extend a hand. Apple-cheeked Adam Silverberg, coolest kid on the bar mitzvah circuit, slaps him an enthusiastic five.

  “Whaddup, Ad Rock?” inquires RISK.

  Adam shrugs. The red knit tie he wears to every bar mitzvah is stained with something pinkish, probably last week’s salmon cream cheese. “You guys need anything?”

  “My man!” says Zone. “Can you hook us up some plates?” With Adam in attendance, they can eat without looking like derelicts for abandoning their station. He’s thrilled to be the kid who gets to hang out with the DJs, more than happy to run errands to the buffet tables and even the bar. Under the quiet tutelage of the senior half of Risk Zone Productions, Ad Rock has become a proficient, gleeful thief of alcohol. His reward, aside from the satisfaction of a job well done, is exemption from the dumb-ass games the kids, brainwashed by the Goldman Agenda, will eventually cajole RISK and Zone into orchestrating. Adam is small for his age, and pudgy; he’s waiting on the growth spurt that will turn him into a ladies’ man, and until then he’s content to bide his time taking DJ lessons and getting schooled on hip-hop. He jogs across the empty dance floor, untied shoelaces flapping, and joins the just-forming lunch line.

  Zone back-cues Risk Zone Productions’ theme music, nudges the volume on the mixer up to two, the proper volume at which to blend it with the buzz of conversation, and lets the record play. A six-note minor-key piano riff falls over heavy drums, and RISK smiles the way he does every time they set a party off like this, with the most wildly—yet subtly—inappropriate bar mitzvah platter in
the crates: “Why Is That?” off the new BDP album, KRS-ONE’s chapter-and-verse breakdown of biblical lineage in service of the argument that Moses was black.

  Nobody but Zone, RISK, and Adam is listening to the lyrics, but something in RISK needs to perform this ritual, mount this unreceived challenge. His place is here behind the turntables, with Zone, and no matter how many of his parents’ friends might come over to say hello, RISK will never step out from behind his barrier to greet them. He is hired help, and Moses was black. He scans the room for signs of recognition, disbelief, outrage, waits for someone to stalk over and argue the point. No takers. Ha. Another victory. Complacent dickheads.

  If only Hyman Pearlmutter could see him now. Agnostic to the core but resolute in the belief that their son should possess at least a half-assed understanding of his cultural roots, RISK’s parents enrolled him at age ten in the Sunday School for Jewish Education. It met at a community college twenty minutes from their house; at first, RISK hated going because it meant missing his weekly fix of televised professional wrestling, but soon he found better reasons for enmity. The other students were lame, off-brand versions of the kids he knew, and RISK was the class dummy. If the holiday wasn’t Hanukkah or Passover, he couldn’t name it. He was sure his parents couldn’t, either, and it pissed him off that he had to waste his weekends learning a bunch of shit they didn’t care about themselves.

  Hebrew class was the worst of all, and when the chance to opt out and take Jewish Cultural History instead presented itself in his second year of study, RISK jumped on it. The teacher was Mr. Pearlmutter: two hundred years old, a staunch Zionist, the kind of guy who spent his Sundays educating the youth because he liked the idea of a captive audience.

  Jewish Cultural History should’ve been called Pearlmutter’s Pride and Prejudice. Between monologues on Hebraic Heroes—Shlomo Ben-Yosef, Meir Kahane, Sandy Koufax—the teacher held forth on the differences between the Jews, a great people because they never turned their backs on their communities, and the blacks, not a great people because they did. All around RISK, kids sat nodding their heads, while RISK’s was practically exploding, his brain incapable of assimilating what he was hearing with the parental maxim that Your Teacher Is Always Right.

  The third week of class, RISK stood up and told Pearlmutter he was wrong, that plenty of black people didn’t abandon their communities when success came calling. Pearlmutter, 118 pounds of spiritual authority draped in a seersucker suit, challenged his student to list them. The first names that came to RISK’s mind were those of his favorite rappers. Run-DMC, he said. UTFO. Kool Moe Dee. The jumble of nonsense syllables did little to change Pearlmutter’s ethnographic worldview. He told RISK to sit down and shut up, ignored his tears, taught on.

  RISK left school still crying, clambered into his dad’s car, and told him what had happened. Abe’s face glassed over with fury. He drove straight home and called the teacher. RISK stood next to his father, watching how tightly he gripped the phone, listening to the choke in his voice as he demanded, Did you tell my son…RISK felt a surge of vindication. Surely, confronted with his crimes, Pearlmutter would crumble into a pile of dust, like an evil sorcerer on TV.

  Instead, Abe slammed down the phone, and RISK heard his father use the F word for the first time ever: goddamn fucking bigot! Thus ended young RISK’s formal religious education, and with it the promise of a culminating ceremony and an accompanying financial windfall. The only money RISK would make off bar mitzvahs would be in $150 increments.

  Adam returns, a plate in each hand and a cloth-napkin-and-silverware roll poking from each trouser pocket. RISK sets his rations to one side. Zone digs in. He adores bar mitzvah food.

  “It’s your turn to do Coke and Pepsi,” RISK informs him preemptively.

  Zone shovels down a hacked-off chunk of noodle kugel, shakes his head. “I did it last time.”

  “Bullshit. You did not.” Unspoken between them is the fact that Zone has much more cool to spare, but the acknowledgment comes a moment later, in the form of Zone’s agreement to sacrifice some of it by emceeing the contest.

  He is something of a folk hero on the bar mitzvah scene. The more aggressively liberal father types make a point of coming over, one by one, to shoot the shit with him, crack a few jokes, and Zone delights them by being just a regular guy. The bejeweled, pantsuited women inquire as to whether he has had enough to eat, and Zone charms them with his enthusiasm for the spread, tells them he’s eaten so much already that he’s half Jewish. If he’s feeling especially gregarious, he might even toss off a couple of mazel tovs, blow everybody’s mind.

  The kids vie for his attention, dashing over to slap him five and then retreating triumphantly into their edge-of-the-dance-floor gaggles. Zone ushers them into the circle of his hipness, dubbing them “homeboy,” “homegirl,” “my man.” Everybody sneaks quick fascinated looks at his pencil-thin shoulder-length dreadlocks. RISK watches it all, happy to be left alone but jealous of the attention and his partner’s comfort.

  “Coke!” Zone shouts into the Radio Shack microphone forty-five minutes later, as RISK hits the turntable’s stop button. Thirty full-bellied adolescents sprint the length of the parquet to sit on the knees of their crouched, waiting partners.

  “Pepsi!” Everybody races the other way.

  “7Up!” Sixty kids reverse direction halfway across the floor, lurch back the way they came. Eventually, the field is narrowed to one winning couple—two dudes who take the contest way too seriously, so seriously that they don’t realize the whole point is to partner up with a girl. Particularly since Risk Zone Productions, as is their trademark, have forgotten to hit the toy store, have nothing whatsoever to offer in the way of prizes, and eventually award the winners a small battery-run fan suitable for pointing at an overheating amplifier. The taller of the victors informs RISK that at a Steve Goldman party, you get to choose from an array of cassette singles. RISK considers telling the kid, in retaliation, that it’s time to borrow his old man’s razor and get rid of the dark fuzz bracketing his upper lip and giving him the air of a sleazy French rat. But he does not.

  Twice, elderly women ask Zone to lower the volume, claiming their conversations are being impeded. Thrice, RISK is forced to apologize for not having “Hava Nagila,” the song to which the hora is danced. Finally, getting into the make-do spirit that sustained their forefathers through forty years in the desert with nothing to eat but manna and more fucking manna, the revelers organize themselves into a circle anyway and find a chair on which to hoist the Bar Mitzvah Boy, those footing the bill, and the parents of those footing the bill. Zone throws on the instrumental B side to Eric B. & Rakim’s “Microphone Fiend”—a proven substitute, because it has hand claps—and the partygoers pause, palms poised in ready-to-clap rigidity, then cock their heads and don complainy faces.

  RISK nudges Adam. “Set it off.”

  Adam nods through a couple of bars, getting his bearings, then bangs his palms together and bellows, “Hava nagila, hava” to the beat. The crowd joins him on the second go-round, drowning out the record. The circle spins, the chair is raised. Zone pats Adam on the shoulder, turns his back to the dance floor, and pours himself a glass of straight Bacardi from the half bottle the kid liberated from the bar. He downs a slug and passes the cup to RISK, who opens his throat and drains it.

  “Have you been drinking?”

  RISK flinches and wakes up, but catches himself in time to avoid opening his eyes. He tries to play the spasm off as part of a dream, pretend he’s still asleep. A feeble strategy, but worth a shot.

  He can practically see his mother through his eyelids, standing at the foot of the couch with her arms crossed. RISK sighs, turns onto his side, and buries his face in the cleavage of the love seat, executing the move with as much oblivious, somnolent languor as he can muster.

  It’s four in the afternoon, and his crates and turntables are stacked ten feet away, by the kitchen door. RISK, in his infinite stupidity, couldn’t summo
n the energy to carry them downstairs and pass out properly, on his own bed. Instead, he’s lying here in public, right smack in the middle of Linda’s domain, and the moment he opens his mouth to speak a mighty gust of rum fumes is going to escape and swirl around the room like a tornado, flinging newspapers and People magazines every which way and pinning Linda, screaming, to the wall.

  “Tris? Hello?”

  He feigns waking up: flutter-blinks his eyes, stretches his arms above his head, the whole tableau. He drapes the crook of an elbow over his mouth before speaking.

  “Hey.”

  “Have you been drinking?”

  He hates this, the way his mother and father have forced him to become a liar by disapproving of everything he does. The bottle of Bacardi is buried in RISK’s bag of stereo cords now, two mouthfuls left. Perhaps Linda has already seen it. If so, he can hide behind the—what, Fourth Amendment? Whatever. The right to privacy. Flip the argument on its head and go on the offensive, tell his mother she has no right to snoop through his things. Ask her if she’s listening in on his phone calls now, too. Throw some final line about the Gestapo over his shoulder as he slams the basement door, then wait to see if he’s rendered Linda’s evidence inadmissible, earned a mistrial. His father might grant one. Historically, Abe’s household voting record has been characterized by strong support for the Bill of Rights. Although not as strong as his support for his wife.

  RISK twists his face into a look you’d give a crazy person. “No,” he tells Linda, and then adds, “I was at a bar mitzvah,” hoping the invocation of old Yahweh might set a mood of righteous indignation.

  He watches his mother’s jaw edge forward, her lips bunch and jut into what looks almost like a kissing posture. You could bounce quarters off her cheeks, they’re so taut. RISK possesses the sheer dumb tenacity to hold on to his lie forever, and he knows Linda knows it. His guess is that she’s doubly pissed off because she holds an unplayable trump card—eyewitness testimony she can’t mention without compromising its source. The town’s full of her spies.