Twerp Read online

  For several seconds, no one answered. It had to be a trick. Then, at last, a kid named Ira Schwartz in the front row raised his hand. Salzberg called on him, and Ira said, “Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

  “You are wrong.”

  “But—”

  “According to Mr. Twerski, the patriarchs of the Israelites are Lonnie, Eduardo, and Jillian.”

  The class roared with laughter. I felt my face going red.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, Mr. Twerski, but isn’t Jillian a girl’s name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah.”

  “I’m sorry, Rabbi.”

  “Why are you sorry? You’ve taught us a valuable lesson. You’ve taught us that a patriarch can be a girl … or perhaps even a Spaniard. Isn’t Eduardo a Spanish name? Spheradit?”

  “No, Rabbi.”

  “Eduardo isn’t a Spanish name?”

  “Yes, it’s a Spanish name. No, it’s not the name of a patriarch.”

  “So it’s a joke to you, this quiz?”

  “No.”

  “Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob … do you think they’re jokes too?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think Hebrew school is a joke?”

  “No.”

  “What about your bar mitzvah? Do you think that’s a joke?”

  “No, Rabbi.”

  “Then what is the joke? I’m not getting it, Mr. Twerski.”

  “There’s no joke, Rabbi. I didn’t mean to write that.”

  “Does your hand have a mind of its own?”

  The class roared again.

  “No, Rabbi. That’s not—”

  “You’re saying it’s your hand’s fault?”

  “No, Rabbi. It’s my fault.”

  “See me after class, Mr. Twerski.”

  So I sat with my hands folded, waiting for the class to end. When it ended, the rest of the students handed in their quizzes, and half a minute later it was just me and Salzberg alone in the room. He stood up from behind his desk, walked over to the door, closed it, and then sat down again behind his desk. He drummed his fingers on the top of the desk. I took that to mean he wanted me to say something, but I had no idea what to say.

  Finally, I muttered, “I’m sorry, Rabbi.”

  “What are you sorry for?”

  “I’m sorry for messing up the quiz.”

  “It was too hard for you, the quiz?”

  “No, Rabbi.”

  “You didn’t know the patriarchs?”

  “I knew them, Rabbi.”

  “Then explain yourself,” he said.

  The way he said it got to me. Before I had time to realize what I was doing, I was spilling my guts—about writing the love letter for Lonnie, about getting outrun by Eduardo, about getting kissed by Jillian, about buddying up with Beverly Segal, about making Jillian cry, about getting knocked down by Howie Wartnose … and about losing the best friend I had in the world.

  Salzberg listened to the entire story without interrupting me even once. The only sign I had that he was paying attention was when he would nod his head every minute or so. But even if he’d fallen asleep in the middle, I still would’ve kept going. No way was I stopping until the end.

  When I was done, I realized a couple of tears had leaked out. I wiped them from my cheeks and leaned forward with my hands folded.

  “It sounds as though you have a lot on your mind, Mr. Twerski.”

  “Yes, Rabbi.”

  “Do your parents speak Yiddish?”

  “No, Rabbi.”

  “Have you ever heard the word schlimazel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what the word means?”

  “I think it means ‘idiot,’ ” I said.

  “That’s schmuck or schmo or schmendrick.”

  “I thought they were all the same thing.”

  “No, a schlimazel is a fellow who has a run of bad luck. So we say a schlemiel is the fellow who spills his soup. A schlimazel is the fellow the soup lands on. Do you see the difference? Listen to the word, Mr. Twerski: schlimazel. Next year, at your bar mitzvah, your loved ones will come up to you and say mazel tov. That much you know. Mazel tov means ‘good luck.’ The word mazel, by itself, means ‘luck.’ Thus, schlimazel means ‘bad luck.’ ”

  “Am I a schlimazel?”

  “No, Mr. Twerski, you’re just going through a schlimazel phase. I’m sure it will pass. It always does.”

  “What am I supposed to do in the meantime?”

  He cracked a smile. “Watch out for the soup.”

  May 27, 1969

  The Punch Line

  Now here’s the punch line to the entire thing: I’m reading Julius Caesar. It’s sitting right on my desk, the paperback—right next to my notebook, right under my lamp. What a joke, huh? The class started going over it last week, and I was leaning back in my chair, thinking about how, whatever else I’d screwed up, I’d gotten out of doing the book report on Julius Caesar. That was the point, remember?

  So at first I wasn’t even listening to you, Mr. Selkirk. I was hearing the sounds of the words coming out of your mouth, but I wasn’t paying attention to what you were saying. Except it’s harder to keep that going than you might think. Sooner or later, the sounds of the words and the meanings of the words come together, and the sentences start to make sense. You blink your eyes and notice you’re paying attention. It’s like a reflex. You can’t turn it off.

  I can tell you the exact moment I got sucked in. It was when you were talking about how Brutus is different from the rest of the guys who kill Caesar, how the rest of them are out for themselves, but how Brutus thinks he’s doing the right thing for Rome—even if it means stabbing his friend in the back. That got to me, the way you talked about it. The way a guy can hurt his friend by doing the right thing, or doing what he thinks is the right thing. I’m not saying this just to kiss up. I’m sitting at my desk, and I’m reading Julius Caesar, and every page is making sense. Like at the very end, when Brutus runs onto his friend’s sword, and then Mark Antony finds Brutus’s body and says:

  This was the noblest Roman of them all:

  All the conspirators, save only he,

  Did that they did in envy of great Caesar;

  He only, in a general honest thought

  And common good to all, made one of them.

  His life was gentle, and the elements

  So mix’d in him that Nature might stand up

  And say to all the world, “This was a man!”

  That just wrecked me. It’s like the John Henry cartoon all over, except with just words and not pictures. As I said the words to myself, I felt chills running through me. That’s what it means to be a man. You do what you think is right, regardless of who it hurts, and whether it works out, because in the end you have to live with yourself.

  I finished Julius Caesar, but, crazy as it sounds, I still wanted more Shakespeare. So I went back to that speech I had to memorize in fourth grade: “What a piece of work is a man!” I found my old notebook from Mrs. Graber’s class, and then I found the sheet of paper with the speech. Sure, I had to look up half the words. Again. But even before I did that, I knew, just from the sound of the sentences, what Shakespeare was saying:

  What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel, in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?

  That’s life in a nutshell, if you ask me. You think you’re the greatest thing going, the fastest kid in the school, the smartest kid on the block. You’ve got friends who look out for you, good parents, a nice room, and a decent stereo. Heck, you don’t even have to do the Shakespeare assignment! You’ve got life pretty much dancing to your tune.

  Well, that’s what you think ….

  Because one morning you wake up, and you realize you’re no one special, you’re nothing to write home about
. Not even a big nothing. You’re like a teensy-weensy speck of nothing … a “quintessence of dust.”

  Here’s another way to look at it. Two weeks ago, I lost the best friend I ever had. Two weeks from now, I’m going to lose the forty-yard dash on Track and Field Day. I won’t be the fastest kid in P.S. 23 … and it won’t be just a rumor. The entire school will know the truth for themselves. But life will go on. Except, sooner or later, it won’t. Then I’ll be dead, and in a hundred years, or a thousand years, who’s going to care?

  You know how in math class, whenever you’re adding or subtracting fractions, you’re supposed to find the common denominator? The common denominator in life is that in a thousand years, none of us is going to be here. Even if I were still the fastest kid in P.S. 23, even if I were the fastest guy in the world, in a thousand years the result would be the same. I’d be dead and buried, and no one would remember or care. It makes me queasy to think about it, but whatever I do in sixth grade, whatever I do in junior high school and high school and college, whatever I make of myself, I’m still a quintessence of dust.

  But here’s the weird part. Knowing the truth frees you up. Or at least it frees you up if you accept it. Knowing that, in a thousand years, nothing you’re doing or not doing will matter frees you up to do what your heart tells you to do. So I listened to my heart for a couple of days and nights, and I turned off my brain, and then, suddenly, yesterday, as I was sitting in English class, I knew what to do.

  I walked right over to Jillian at the end of the period. She was still sitting at her desk, straightening up her desktop before lunch. She looked real pretty. She had on a pink-and-gray-striped dress. Her brown hair was even darker and shinier than usual, and she had a pink ribbon in it. I looked her straight in the eye and said, “Do you want to go to a movie on Friday?”

  The question seemed to catch her off guard, or maybe just the directness of it caught her off guard. She looked down and went back to shuffling her papers. Then she glanced up at me again. She was interested, but she wasn’t quite smiling. “What movie?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Whatever’s playing at the RKO Keith’s.”

  “Would it be just the two of us?”

  “I’m sure there’ll be other people in the theater.”

  “But not Lonnie?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I spoke to him about us. He said he doesn’t care.”

  “Trust me, he does care. But it doesn’t matter.”

  “But why would he say he doesn’t care if he does?”

  “Because he’s a great guy. That’s what I’ve been telling you.”

  “Then why are you asking me to go to the movies on Friday?”

  “Because it doesn’t matter. He’ll get over it. Or else he won’t.”

  “But he’s your friend.”

  “You don’t have to remind me, Jillian. I know he’s my friend.”

  “I don’t want to come between—”

  “Do you want to go to the movies with me or not?”

  “You’re supposed to act nicer when you ask me that,” she said.

  That was when I realized I was ruining it for her. “I’m sorry.”

  “Is this the first time you’ve ever asked out a girl?”

  There was no reason to lie to her. “Yes.”

  “Friday is Memorial Day. We don’t have school. You know that, right?”

  “Why does that matter?”

  “Your family doesn’t do stuff together?”

  “Not that I know of,” I said.

  She hesitated another second. “All right.”

  “So you’re saying yes?”

  “Where and when do you want to meet?” she asked.

  “How about the RKO Keith’s at seven-thirty?”

  “Are we going to dinner first? Or should I eat at home?”

  “Which would you rather?”

  She cracked a smile. “You really haven’t thought this through, have you?”

  “I want to go to the movies with you, Jillian. Do you want to go with me?”

  “I do.”

  “Then let’s go,” I said.

  “What about dinner?”

  “Why don’t you eat dinner at home and then meet me afterward?”

  She thought it over. “If I get my dad to drop me off, do you think your dad will drive me home?”

  “I’ll ask him.”

  “If he can’t, will you ride the bus back to Bayside with me?”

  “If it comes to that,” I said.

  “Do you promise?”

  “I promise that you won’t have to ride the bus home alone.”

  She put out her hand. “Then it’s a date.”

  As I shook her hand, I was thinking, I’m a quintessence of dust with a date for Friday night.

  June 1, 1969

  Date Night

  An hour after I asked Jillian to go to the movies, I began to ask myself, What did you do that for? That’s what happens when your heart gets out in front of your brain. Your brain catches up, except by then there’s nothing to do but scratch your head. Still, it wasn’t like I was going to take it back. Sooner or later, I was going to have a first date. Why not Jillian Rifkin?

  So, no, I didn’t want to take it back. I just didn’t want to think about date stuff. Like what movie we were going to see. Like whether twelve dollars, which was how much allowance I’d saved up, would be enough to buy tickets, popcorn, and sodas for both of us. Like whether I was supposed to kiss her good night.

  If you step back and analyze the thing, of course, you’d have to say the main reason I asked out Jillian was because I was mad at Lonnie. There’s no dodging it. Which, I guess, makes me a double louse. I’m a lousy friend to Lonnie. And I’m a lousy boyfriend to Jillian. Writing that word feels weird: “boyfriend.” Even thinking about it feels weird. It feels like a pair of dress shoes that doesn’t fit, the kind where your feet are swimming around inside so you have to put on two pairs of socks and then pull the laces real tight, and you wind up with blisters below your ankles. I’d never thought of myself as anyone’s “boyfriend.” But if the first date went well, and if we went out on another date, then you’d have to say I was Jillian’s boyfriend.

  The thought made me kind of queasy.

  Between Wednesday and Friday, I spent hours and hours going through the date in my mind, trying to work out every possible way it could go. But there were too many if-thens. Like with popcorn, for example: If she wanted popcorn, then should we both wait on line for it, or should she get us good seats while I waited on line? But in that case, after I bought the popcorn, how would I find her in the dark theater? Stuff like that. The kind of stuff you don’t have to worry about if you’re going to the movies with the guys because then you can just yell out one of their names, and he’ll call back and wave his arms, and you’ll call back to him, and who cares if the grown-ups sitting around you start going, “Shhhhh!”

  I would’ve given my right arm—not really, of course—to talk it out with Lonnie, to get his take on things. But that was out of the question since the date was with Jillian. Not to mention that he wouldn’t give me the time of day. It killed me every morning, waiting for the bus, the way he walked right past me without even a glance. Between him and Howie Wartnose, I was public enemy number one. Eric the Red and Shlomo Shlomo weren’t as obvious. They’d at least nod hello. Still, you could tell they felt weird about it. The only one who stuck by me was Quick Quentin. But I don’t think he has it in him to hold a grudge.

  So I was flying solo.

  Sure, I could’ve talked it out with my dad. That’s how the world works on TV …. You know, the son sits down with his dad to get the facts of life. No question he would’ve razzed me, but he would’ve cut it out once he realized I was desperate. Talking to him also would’ve solved the problem of getting Jillian home after the date. I came close on Friday morning. I woke up an hour early and walked with him the three blocks to Thirty-First Avenue, where he’d parked t
he car the night before. The entire time, I was just about to spill my guts. I even got into the car with him, and he asked me what was on my mind. But I couldn’t answer him. I couldn’t get that first word out. I sat there and shrugged. He drove me back to the house without asking again.

  If I couldn’t talk to my dad about the date beforehand, I sure couldn’t ask him to drive Jillian home afterward. Which meant I was going to ride the bus back to Bayside with her. That much, at least, was settled.

  So I decided to let it go. Whatever happened, happened. I stopped thinking about if-then and focused on being a quintessence of dust. Would it matter in a thousand years what happened on my date with Jillian? What was the worst thing that could happen? I mean, if I pissed my pants in the movie theater, would it make a difference in a thousand years? People will be riding around in flying cars, going from planet to planet, and taking pills that let them watch movies inside their brains. Who will remember the kid who pissed his pants in the RKO Keith’s?

  By Friday afternoon, I didn’t just feel like dust. I was dust. I could taste it in the back of my throat. There was dust in the corners of my eyes, and I could hear it blowing around in my ears. I could feel the wind coming up behind me and carrying me forward, light as dust, from the present to the future, and I had no more control over where I was going than a tumbleweed rolling across a desert.

  Late in the afternoon, I took a quick walk over to the RKO Keith’s to find out what films were playing. It turned out there were two possibilities: Nightmare in Wax or Mackenna’s Gold. Both started at eight o’clock, so either worked since we were supposed to meet at seven-thirty. I stared at the marquee for a full minute. I didn’t care, to be honest, but girls don’t like horror movies, or at least they say they don’t like horror movies, which nixed Nightmare in Wax. So that left Mackenna’s Gold, which was a western. If nothing else, I figured there would be a tumbleweed in it.

  Then I went home and tried to act as though nothing was going on. I told my mom I’d be out later than usual but no later than eleven o’clock. She likely figured I’d be over at Lonnie’s house watching television or trading baseball cards or doing whatever we did when we were together. She had no reason to ask questions, and she didn’t.