Jake the Fake Keeps It Real

by Craig Robinson

  “Good morning,” he said, and sort of bowed at us. “My name is Forrest McKenzie Ramos. I am pleased to make your acquaintance.” And he shook our hands.

  “Howdy,” Azure said.

  “Hey, dude,” I added. “Where are you from?” I thought the answer might be “The year 1890” or something.

  Instead, he named a town way out in the boondocks, then said, “My parents homeschooled me until now. Often in the woods, to better appreciate the glories of nature. I have never been inside a school before. I find walls very confining. There are no squirrels here.”

  “That’s a lot of information, Forrest,” Azure pointed out.

  “You have a cobweb on your face,” Forrest replied, and tried to brush it off with his enormous hand.

  Azure caught it, ninja-style, and returned it to his side. “I know,” she said. “It’s okay. But thanks.”

  By then, we were at the front of the line. Azure told the librarian-type lady behind the desk her name, and the lady handed over a packet of papers and marked her forehead.

  “Who’d you get for homeroom?” I asked as she riffled through it.

  “Mr. Allen,” Azure said, crinkling up her nose. “Is that good or bad?”

  “It’s good,” I told her.

  Then the lady handed me my packet, and my heart sank. I had some guy called Mr. Bonaroo.

  Before Forrest could say his name, I turned back to the lady and gave her my most winning smile.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “But is there any way that I could be in Mr. Allen’s homeroom? My sister told me he’d be perfect for my, uh, my learning style.”

  I had no idea what that meant, since my learning style was basically to sit in the back row sneakily reading a comic book, but it sounded pretty good.

  Less good was that Azure might think I was doing this because she got Mr. Allen and I was some weirdo who was obsessed with her after a two-minute conversation or something. But it was a chance I’d have to take.

  “Sorry,” said the lady. “Assignments are assignments.”

  But then she furrowed her brow and looked down at a paper on her desk and murmured, “Liston,” and when she looked back up at me there was a half smile on her face.

  “You’re Lisa’s little brother,” she told me, like it was news or something. The half smile became a full smile. She beckoned for my packet back, and I handed it over.

  “For Lisa’s little brother, I can make an exception,” she said, uncapping her marker.

  It’s been two weeks, and I still can’t figure out whether:

  a) Lisa was right, and Mr. Allen is a total genius.

  b) Lisa was lying, and Mr. Allen is crazier than a bag of snot.

  c) Both Lisa and Mr. Allen are crazier than a bag of snot. Or, I guess, two bags of snot. Or possibly one jumbo-size value bag of snot.

  d) I am now crazier than a bag of snot from being in Mr. Allen’s homeroom.

  Mr. Allen’s homeroom started with eleven kids, but within two days we were down to eight. Why? Because here’s how we spent those two days.

  Day One: Introductions. By “introductions,” I do not mean we told each other our names or where we’re from or whether we have any pets. I mean that Mr. Allen passed out instruments at random—I got a French horn—and had us “tell our stories” with them. I banged my head against the French horn three times, then put it on the floor and petted it like a dog. Mr. Allen applauded.

  Azure got a triangle. She attached it to her nose like a ring and wore it for the rest of the day.

  Forrest got a banjo, and he closed his eyes and hugged it for so long that even Mr. Allen got weirded out.

  After introductions was music. You might think music would involve the playing of music, but you would be wrong. Music involved Mr. Allen taking all these old Beatles records out of a closet and explaining to us that Paul McCartney had secretly died in a car accident and been replaced by a guy named Billy Spears, and for some reason the remaining Beatles used their records to drop all kinds of clues and hints about the cover-up, which seems like a dumb thing to do if you don’t want anyone to know.

  Mr. Allen played one record backward so we could hear the voice saying “Turn me on, dead man,” and another record forward so we could hear the voice saying “I buried Paul,” which to me sounded a lot more like “cranberry sauce.” He showed us how on the cover of one record, the four guys are dressed as a priest, an undertaker, a gravedigger, and a corpse, and then he turned off the lights and took out a black light so we could see the skull hidden on another cover.

  That was music.

  I’m not even going to talk about social studies.

  The only classes we had without Mr. Allen were earth science and gym, both of which were pretty normal, since kickball is kickball even at an art school, and classifying rocks is equally pointless no matter where you do it.

  You know what nobody has ever said in the history of the world? Quick, there’s no time to waste! The only way to save the day is by figuring out whether this rock is igneous or sedimentary! Everything depends on that!

  We also had lunch, which I have to admit was delicious.

  M&AA’s cafeteria is being run this year by some food activist who believes in serving fresh organic food. So we had a salad with rocket (the lettuce, not the spaceship), beets, and blue cheese, then chicken sandwiches with avocado and roasted yams. Whereas last year, the menu at my school was like:

  Monday: hamburgers and French fries

  Tuesday: chicken nuggets and tater tots

  Wednesday: meatloaf made of Monday’s leftover hamburgers and French fries

  Thursday: cheeseburgers and badger vomit

  Friday: pizza topped with cut-up chicken nuggets

  I think my new goal is to gain fifty pounds before I get kicked out of this school.

  Day Two: Music again. This time we got to play instruments, but not our instruments. Also, we had to switch instruments every five minutes and play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” over and over.

  On one hand, it was interesting to try to figure out a new instrument, and some kids could do it super fast, though not me. On the other hand, I was kind of hoping to get the drums so I could puncture my eardrums with the drumsticks and go deaf, which would be way better than having to listen to that mess.

  After music was art criticism, which involved going up to the roof and writing reviews of the bird poop splattered all over the place.

  That was the final straw for Travis and Lenora, two of the kids who dropped out, although I have to say I kind of liked writing the reviews and it made me lean slightly toward a) Mr. Allen is a total genius.

  I think the lesson he wanted to teach us is that you can have a point of view about anything, and who’s to say what’s art and what isn’t?

  Then again, I didn’t get pooped on by birds. Unlike Travis and Lenora.

  The final straw for Nathan was math. This was math:

  Mr. Allen: I’m thinking of a number between one and seven million. Who knows what it is?

  Silence.

  Mr. Allen: Come on. Hands?

  Azure: Four?

  Mr. Allen: Nope.

  Nathan: Six million, three hundred thousand, one hundred and forty-seven?

  Mr. Allen: Nope.

  Me: Thirty thousand and two.

  Mr. Allen: Certainly not.

  Forrest: Four?

  Mr. Allen: It still isn’t four.

  Zenobia: Five?

  Forty seconds of silence. Then:

  Mr. Allen: Correct. Class dismissed.

  And then there were eight of us.

  I’ve already talked about Forrest and Azure. Here is a brief guide to the other kids in my homeroom:

  Zenobia

  ▪ has six older brothers, therefore the toughest kid in our class

  ▪ plays oboe

  ▪ makes her own oboe reeds out of trees that she cuts down with an ax, then whittles until they are the size of a fingernail


  ▪ good sense of humor, meaning she laughed at a joke I told her about a chicken who keeps going to the library and saying “book book book” so the librarian follows her and finds out she’s giving all the books to a frog who says “readit, readit” (joke is funnier if you do the the punch line in a frog voice)

  Whitman

  ▪ named after Walt Whitman, the famous poet

  ▪ parents are jerks

  ▪ does not write poetry

  ▪ basically does not talk

  ▪ supposedly is the best under-eighteen crocheter in the state, whatever that means

  Bin-Bin

  ▪ speaks English, Mandarin, Swedish, Romanian, some Persian

  ▪ often speaks them all in the same sentence, which is confusing

  ▪ super good at painting and archery

  ▪ sometimes combines the two by attaching globs of paint to arrows and shooting them at canvases

  ▪ has a pet ferret named Airtight Willie

  ▪ laughs for no reason

  ▪ laughing causes her to sneeze

  Cody

  ▪ most serious kid in class

  ▪ is dead-set on being a professional sculptor

  ▪ wears a necklace with a miniature chisel on it, given to him by his parents

  ▪ parents are both accountants, but very supportive of sculptor plan

  ▪ keeps asking if things are going to be “on the test,” even though Mr. Allen has never mentioned anything about a test

  ▪ kind of annoying

  ▪ by “kind of,” I mean “ultra”

  Klaus

  ▪ German exchange student

  ▪ doesn’t like it when you sing “We’re German, we’re German, we’re German, we’re German/I hope you like Germans, too” to the tune of the Bob Marley song “Jammin’ ”

  ▪ plays drums

  ▪ as if he has eight arms

  ▪ so fast he’s like a blur

  ▪ while screaming at the top of his lungs

  ▪ only eats beige foods

  ▪ wears Hello Kitty everything

  And as long as I’m doing a brief guide, I guess I might as well include:

  Mr. Allen

  ▪ child violin prodigy who played Carnegie Hall when he was seven

  ▪ gave up violin at eleven and picked up the didgeridoo, an Australian wind instrument that is six to ten feet long and made from a fallen tree trunk hollowed out by termites

  ▪ played didgeridoo at Carnegie Hall when he was twelve

  ▪ gave up the didgeridoo for the oud, a Middle Eastern stringed instrument

  ▪ and so on

  ▪ sang for a rock band that had a song called “Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby” in 1991 that sold 2.5 million records, then broke up before they could release an album

  ▪ song made him rich

  ▪ we think

  ▪ went back to school for teaching

  ▪ makes all his own clothes

  ▪ cuts his own hair

  ▪ though only about once a decade, it looks like

  ▪ heart-song animal is a chickadee

  Today began with something Mr. Allen called a listening meditation. The faucet in the sink in our classroom (for some reason our classroom has a sink) is broken and dripping, and Mr. Allen had us lie down and close our eyes and listen to the drips. He said we should pay attention to how our minds tried to organize the sound, but my mind mostly chose to focus on the part of Batman Begins I’d watched with my dad last night. After about twenty minutes, a janitor showed up to fix the leak, and we listened to that. He didn’t seem to like working in front of an audience, even an audience with its eyes closed.

  After the listening assignment, we got our first English assignment, which was to write a book report.

  Bin-Bin pointed out that Mr. Allen never told us to read a book, and asked if we should write about a book we’d already read or what.

  “No,” said Mr. Allen. “I want you to write a report on a book that does not exist.”

  “So we make up the book, and then we make up the report?” Zenobia asked.

  “Exactly,” Mr. Allen said, and gave her a high five. “The book should be between two hundred and two hundred and fifty pages, and the report is due tomorrow.”

  It’s going to be a long night.

  Evan came over after school to play Horse on the basketball hoop in my driveway. In case you don’t know, Horse basically means you take a shot, and if you make it, the other person has to make the same shot. If he misses, he gets an H, and then an O, and so on.

  We always call it playing Horse, but Evan and I usually pick an animal with a longer name so the game can last longer. Today we were playing Rhinoceros, and I was complaining about the book report.

  “In a way, it’s more work,” I said, and bricked a jump shot. “Instead of just reading a book and saying what I think, I’ve gotta make up the whole story.”

  Evan shrugged and started lining up one of his crazy trick shots. He’s basically terrible at basketball, but he’s a master of bizarre shots that only work in Horse, which is why I was already a R-H-I-N-O-C to his R-H.

  “What if you say it’s an experimental novel with only one word on each page? Then the whole thing would only be a couple sentences.” He turned his back to the basket and bounced the ball through his legs and off the backboard and through the hoop.

  Sometimes I hate Evan.

  “I guess I could,” I said. “Seems weird, though.” I tried Evan’s shot, didn’t even hit the backboard, and got an E.

  “Weird?” Evan repeated. “Dude, everything about that school is weird.”

  He walked behind the hoop, closed his eyes, and lofted a shot over the whole backboard and right through the net.

  As I was preparing to miss, Lisa and Pierre pulled up in the Pierremobile.

  “Yo, disgraced early-twentieth-century baseball star Shoeless Bro Jackson! I’m open!” Pierre yelled, stepping out and flashing his palms at me. I heaved him the ball and he shot all the way from the curb. The ball slammed against the backboard so hard the whole pole shook, but it went in. Lisa clapped, and he threw back his arms like he’d just won the NBA Finals.

  Sometimes it feels like everybody in life is hitting their shots except me. This was one of those times. I blamed it on the book report. It was like a big rock sitting in my stomach.

  I knew I’d feel terrible until I wrote it, but I also knew that I’d avoid writing it as long as possible.

  “What are you dorks up to?” Lisa asked, smiling at Evan.

  They’ve always gotten along really well for some reason, maybe because Evan doesn’t have to live with her.

  “Collecting rare ant specimens,” I answered for him. “What’s it look like? Jeesh.”

  Pierre raised his eyebrows. “Rough day at school, Libyan dictator Bro-mar Gaddafi?”

  I shot and the ball clanged off the rim. “Mr. Allen’s making us do a book report on an imaginary book.”

  “Awesome,” Lisa said.

  “Groovy,” Pierre agreed, nodding.

  “How do I do it?”

  They looked at me like I was some kind of slimy alien creature that had just busted out of its egg and started crawling toward them.

  “Just…make…it…up,” Lisa said super slowly, like she was speaking to a person with a severe head injury.

  The Shortest Giant in the World by Calamari Bogdonovich

  A BOOK REVIEW

  by Dr. Jake Liston, PhD

  The Shortest Giant in the World is a pretty great novel, which is probably why it won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1978 and also sold seventy-six million copies. I’ll get to the plot in a second, but first I want to talk about the author, because he led a pretty fascinating life.

  Calamari Bogdonovich was the only son of a notorious criminal named Joey “Squid Hands” Bogdonovich, who was famous for being able to steal rings right off people’s fingers without them noticing.

  He hoped Calamari would go into the family
business of being a dirtbag, but Calamari always knew he wanted to be a writer. He ran away from home at the age of twelve and spent years just pointlessly riding the rails and heating up cans of beans on campfires and carrying all his stuff around in a handkerchief tied to a stick and stuff like that. Then he got bored, so he went to Harvard University and became a nuclear physicist. I guess he forgot that he’d always known he wanted to be a writer. But then he remembered and started writing and the rest is history.

  The Shortest Giant in the World is about a guy named Larry who is five feet eight inches tall, but for some reason everybody thinks he’s a giant—a record-breakingly short giant. He keeps trying to explain that he’s not a giant at all, just a regular guy, but nobody believes him, and they keep carrying on about what a miracle it is that he’s so small. Reporters and photographers follow him around nonstop, and he can’t get a moment’s peace.

  Eventually he gets so sick of the attention that he builds a boat and just sails off into the ocean. He happens to be really good at building boats. So he sails all the way across the world, with nobody for company but his trusty pet cat, Mittens, who hates water and people and is kind of a bad choice for a companion on a long boat trip.