by Jesse Ball
My aunt, what a lady.
PAPER
I guess that meant I wasn’t going to get an award for the paper. It’s not like I worked that hard on it. Some of the other kids started asking me to write their papers for them. I said do your own work, weaklings. Actually, I didn’t say that. I just said, no.
Beekman read some of it out loud to the class,
Whatever this material means to the author, there is a dangerous implication. That implication is that the vengeful burning of one another’s dwellings by these peasants is not political, and is not a thing that is performed with agency. In fact, the burning is a result of the ignorance forced upon the peasants by their masters, and by the imposition of a religious framework that fails to prepare them to weather the calamity of their daily lives. The people with agency in the situation have total agency, that is, the masters control completely what happens. When the peasants burn each other’s huts, or even burn their own huts (by accident), the masters have chosen to permit the burning of the huts to occur. It is they who are guilty.
Everyone looked pretty bored while he read it, and I really wished that he would stop. At the end, he asked why it was good, which really made me turn bright red. I completely hid in my hood at the back of the class.
The first girl who raised her hand asked if she could get up to throw her gum out.
Beekman said yes, now—what was good about the paper?
Somebody said maybe it was good because I had read the book.
He said, that was important. He said he often got papers written by people who hadn’t read the book. But, it wasn’t that.
Someone else said something stupid, so Beekman was forced to come out and say it himself, which he should have done in the first place if he wanted it to get said.
He said, it was good because I read the book with an open but argumentative mind. He said the paper was at least good enough to be a college paper, whatever that means. I really wish that he hadn’t said that part, but the first part was okay.
It is pretty stupid, how I felt. I felt that—I wished my aunt was there to hear it. She doesn’t get to hear much that is positive about me. The landlord even told her I am a bad kid, which was rough. He is an old Ukrainian guy, and I thought he liked me.
The sad thing is, I can’t even repeat this stuff about the paper because that would be boasting.
PSYCH VISIT
I guess this was the principal’s revenge. Since he couldn’t give me the detention without my aunt flogging him, he notified the psychologist that she should check up on me.
I want to see how you are settling in, she told me.
I sat down in her office and was immediately really unhappy. This is how it is—there are no chairs. I kid you not. There are two beanbags. She sits on a beanbag and you sit on the other, or, if you want, you both sit on the floor, I guess. Sometimes, she does this thing where she switches from the beanbag to the floor, like some kind of conciliatory gesture. The beanbag chairs are different colors, and I’m sure it means something to her which one you choose. Thinking that made me hesitant to sit before her, so I let her sit first, but I’m sure that means something too. She is really young, Ms. Kapleau, and extremely beautiful, which is why all the male teachers do boss stuff when she is in the hall, like clapping each other on the shoulder and leaning on things. Even the students do. I’m sure all the guys would like to fuck her. On this visit, she was wearing an inappropriate skirt. It was fine, as skirts go, but miniskirts and beanbag chairs are not a match made in heaven.
I told her that I was fine. I was going to try to make it for two more years and then be done. If I couldn’t, I would leave before that, since I legally don’t have to stay any longer.
What is keeping you here? she asked.
I said I didn’t want to disappoint my aunt.
She asked me if I loved my aunt.
I didn’t answer that. What bullshit—where they use whatever you say to make further questions.
Then, she asked if I was angry. I said that anyone who loves freedom should be angry. That shut her up.
We sat there for a while, and then she said she wanted to read me something. She got some shitty poem by Rumi and read it to me. There is a candle in your heart …
I laughed, and she asked me why I was laughing.
I said, you small-minded bitch, you think that is poetry? Of all Rumi’s goddamned poems, you pick that one? Did you find it in some psych-nonsense anthology? That has to be his worst poem, and it isn’t even translated well. How does it feel to wade around in life so hopelessly? You are just mired in shit. You’re so limited.
I laughed some more. Of all the poems, that one.
She was looking at me in shock. I think she was actually speechless, so I gave her some more.
Whoever’s calm and sensible is insane.
What?
I said, that’s Rumi. Or didn’t you know?
I didn’t feel at all bad that I made her cry. After all, a school psychologist probably has to cry a lot in the first years of working at a school. There must be a great deal that they aren’t ready for.
HOME
Well, I got in trouble for that. When I got home, I told my aunt the whole story, about the beanbags, the Rumi poem, everything. I did it because I felt like I had broken the rules. I wasn’t proud of being mean to her. When I’m not proud of what I’ve done, I tell my aunt about it. I used to tell my dad. Now I tell my aunt.
I’m sure it gives her a picture of me that is pretty unflattering, since I tell her all the bad things, but none of the good ones.
She asked me if I thought that it was my job to improve the school psychologist.
I said, no.
She asked if I thought of myself as a person who goes around improving other people by showing them their shortcomings.
I said, no I wasn’t that sort of person.
She said, it was puzzling then, why I would say that to the woman. Wasn’t I trying to improve her? There was another explanation, she said. Maybe I just wanted to demonstrate to the woman that I was smarter than she was. Maybe I was showing off.
I said maybe it was that.
She said, if that was true, then it meant I must feel weak and ashamed, if I need to demonstrate my intelligence, rather than just having it.
She said that quietly, and then turned away to make some tea.
Boy, did I feel awful.
My aunt, when she gives it to you, she really gives it to you. When she brought the tea over she said it is possible my comprehension was not of the really good sort, but just a mean sort of proto-intelligence, and that was why I was being mean. Maybe I was embarrassed about its quality and magnitude, and that led me to go after these low-hanging fruit.
I could see that the corner of her mouth was turning, so I burst out laughing, and she laughed too. It was a good joke.
BELL
Later that evening, we were sitting there and I could hear a church bell from the Orthodox church around the corner. My ear followed the sound there and back, there and back, my eye trailing the distance to the church in the dark. I asked my aunt if she was awake. She stirred in her chair and said yes, she was. I said, how did you make it so long. She asked what I meant. I said, there are so many years. How can you be alone so long. She said she didn’t know.
She pulled the blanket up onto herself and curled a little in the chair. I could see she was thinking. She does this thing where she cocks her head.
A person comes to the door. I ask: Who is at my door? What do they say?
She asked me again, what do they say?
I said, I don’t know. What.
She laughed.
They call to me from outside, It is you at the door, my love!
Wait, I remember, I said. I remember that. It is thou, beloved!
Yes, she said. Jalal ad-Din Rumi. A person who was always standing outside his own door.
EMPTY LOT
I went to the place, Fourth and Simonen, during th
e day, in order to check it out. Originally, I was just going to go at night to the actual meeting, but then I decided against it. I thought—why not go and look at what it is like and then you can have an idea about whether it is a terrible notion to show up there with some creeps and be potentially raped to death. This is what any right-thinking girl would say to herself.
Along Fourth there are a whole bunch of ramshackle houses. I guess they used to be brownstones. Now they are hovels. There are some places where you can give them a check and they give you 60 percent of the check in cash. There is a barbershop, no, there are three barbershops, and they are all open late, or so they say on the outside—you know, because everyone needs a haircut at one a.m.
I walked up and down the block and had some conversations that I won’t repeat.
There was a little box someone had hammered to a telephone pole. It said, Community Library. There was a copy of a Dos Passos novel with the last chapter torn out (a nasty trick) as well as two Danielle Steel books and a shitty children’s book about a unicorn. I know that because I read it standing there. The book is called My Own Unicorn, and it is about a girl who wants to have a unicorn, so her father buys her one, and then she is happy. I’m not kidding. That’s the plot. The final picture is of a happy girl with her hand on the unicorn’s mane.
My thought on that is—it wasn’t a goddamned unicorn. The point of unicorns is you don’t just get them. So the book isn’t even bad, it’s just invalid.
I had a thrift copy of Benjamin Franklin, some Poor Richard’s Almanac stuff they put together. It was okay, but I had looked at it a little already, so I stuck it in there. Maybe someone will like it.
When I got down to Simonen, the neighborhood changed, if anything, for the worse. The empty lot as they called it was a housing project with a huge fence around it, half of it demolished, the other half decrepit. If I had to pick a place to murder someone, this would be it. I walked around the outside and it was enough to make you cry. It was very beautiful, too, though. I found a spot where I could climb the fence and I went in. It was really quiet in there.
The overgrown part was just a huge lot, maybe the size of a football field, maybe larger, I mean it stretched forever. All the crappy trees that grow when nothing else is growing were there, busting up through the concrete as far as the eye could see. All the walls, wherever they were bare, were covered in graffiti. There were piles of blankets or sleeping bags where people maybe had tried to live. I wandered across the lot. It took me ten minutes to cross it; I kept getting distracted by how alone I was—and how wonderful it felt. Eventually I got into the complex of buildings. There was a kind of driveway with window frames thrown down every fifteen feet. At the end of it was a beautiful courtyard. The windows from the buildings looked down into it and I got completely creeped out, but I couldn’t run away. It was too far. Where would I run to? So, I found a place under a tree where the windows couldn’t see me, and I sat and ate my lunch.
I was embarrassed to mention this earlier, but since I have said everything else, I might as well say this, too. My aunt makes me a lunch that I have when I go places (like school), since we can’t afford to buy things. It is: a hard-boiled egg and a piece of bread and a carrot. The bread she makes herself and it is not good bread. Some people can make bread, some can’t. My aunt is awful at it. I have eaten so much of this bread in the last year, I can’t tell you. But, I am practically psychically compelled to eat it, because when I don’t I have this grievous identification with her in my mind as she leans over the oven with her bad back taking the bread out. So, I have to eat it.
The good thing about that lunch is—it is over in about fifteen seconds. That leaves me more time for other things. Most people—their lunch takes them five minutes at least, sometimes ten or twenty, so they are lagging behind me in efficiency.
I have the licorice, too—which makes the shitty lunch bearable. When I run out of licorice, it gets bad.
You may be wondering whether I was brave enough to go into the buildings. I was not brave enough to go in. I had the thought that I would be a coward if I didn’t go in. Then, I looked at one of the places where the door was broken down. That’s where I would go in, I thought to myself. Then, I thought, I am not going in there, no matter what. You can’t make me. Then, I tried to make myself do it, and it didn’t happen. So, I am that much of a coward, at least.
I went back to the lot, and found a nearer place where I could get out by climbing a wall on the inside. When I jumped down to the sidewalk, there were two guys playing dice in the shade right by me.
Shit, said one of them. What were you doing in there?
None of your business, I said, in a nice, play-along way, and he laughed.
I sat and talked to them for a while and watched them play cee-lo. I wanted to play too, but I didn’t have any money. It’s mostly luck, but it is slightly better to go first, so the trick is—you and your friends make sure the stranger has to go last. That way your money stays with your group. Eventually, then, you have all the stranger’s money.
CEE-LO
You throw three dice and it is only something if you get:
111,222,333,444,555,666
or
any two that are the same and one of something else, which counts as the something else, ie., 33,5 is a 5.
or
123 & 456.
The game is kind of rigged, and here’s why: 1,2,3 is an instant loss. You are removed from the game, but the game continues for everyone else. Meanwhile, 4,5,6 is an instant win. The game is over—bang. You get all the money.
So, the way to think of it—of whether it is fair—is to consider, what if the game was just with one die and you throw it—if you get a 1 a 2 or a 3 you win everything. Let’s imagine that is the game. Well, if that was the case, then you would definitely not want to be last in a group of people who are throwing the dice. Because then you would have a 50 percent chance of losing your money whenever someone else goes. And each of the five guys who are ahead of you are going to go before you. If you put in five dollars or ten dollars, which are common stakes, you could lose as much as 25 or 50 dollars, without ever getting to touch the dice! I grant you, in the actual game, that is uncommon, it would be 2 or 3 percent, I think, per roll of 456—but we are talking about the fairness—and over time, it ends up being pretty unfair.
So, you have to have enough money to suffer the loss that will happen before you get to go, just to make sure you have money to put in the pot for your turn, and then you’d better hope you have at least average good fortune when you do get to go first.
If it truly rotates and everyone gets to go first the same number of times, well, fine. But, people often get tricked out of going first because the dice game will move, people come and go. I have seen it happen. Also, people will often leave right after having gotten to go first, which is a creep move. If the players in the game keep coming and going—and there are a lot of fresh faces, and those people are getting to go first when they arrive for reasons you can’t fathom, well, watch out! Basically the same trick is that they will change the bet when your turn comes around—so the time when you go first is a short-bet, and the rest of the times, the bet is large. The way they do this con is they let you go first, and everyone throws a dollar down. Then when that turn is through, they up the bet to five or ten.
One other trick they will do is when it is about to be your turn someone will throw the dice so that one die gets lost. Then the game is off until another die is found, and at that point there is a new order, and you are at the back of the line again. What bullshit! And if you try to argue, you could even get beaten up—or worse, some of these guys are charismatic. They’ll just talk real sweet and make you seem like an asshole for trying to be some kind of stickler. But everyone knows what is actually going on.
There is a different version that is slightly more fair that involves the dice-throwing player being “the bank.” Then, the rest match his/her bet. People will play that
version if they play for a lot of money. I have only seen it once.
And as I was saying at the beginning, even if things are fair—you can be in big trouble when it is you versus a group of people who are friends. This is because they exist as a sort of big bank that preserves itself. Whereas, when you run out of money, you have to stop playing. You stop playing because they have your money and you have no money. They never have to stop playing because it simply won’t happen (unless you are really lucky) that you win all of the money that they have in common.
Essentially, if you are going to weather bad runs of luck, you need to have enough money to never stop playing.
Enough about cee-lo. I’m sorry to talk so much about it—but I really like thinking about games. My aunt would definitely come up with some better rules if she were a dice player.
PAMPHLET
A few days before, at school, Stephan had given me a full copy of the arson pamphlet that he got when he went to somebody’s house. I imagine he must have gone and photocopied it himself, which is ridiculous. He had to be really stuck on me to photocopy a whole pamphlet for no reason. I didn’t even thank him. Sometimes when people get to be too nice, you end up not thanking them, because you are completely tired of saying thank you. Then they become more and more hangdog and you want to thank them even less.
