Just as the stronger will always win in such a contest of strength, so will the win always go to the faster in a contest of speed. And simple slapslap is but a contest of speed. Strategy is nearly impossible. Thinking is all but useless. The game allows for no details in which a devil, let alone a human being, might reside. It’s like a novel about people who use common sense to arrive at comforting, commonsense conclusions.
When, however, the distinctions between balks and fakes and between twitches and flinches are of consequence, a great variety of slapslapping strategies can’t help but develop; strategies based on faking and faux-faking, on drawing balks with skillful twitches, on toying with opponents’ expectations by establishing and then departing from rhythms, etc. Yes, gimmes and do-overs are frustrating, born of and then bearing only more epistemological discomfort, but for every instance of controversy over a balk/fake or flinch/twitch, there are, between honorable slapslappers, at least ten instances free of controversy; ten in which the slapslapper scores by his wits, by his capacity to be unpredictable, and is properly recognized.
Simple slapslap only wishes it were checkers to real slapslap’s chess. Simple slapslap is tic-tac-toe.
The Way It Was Done At Schechter
When I started kindergarten at the Solomon Schechter School of Chicago, Emmanuel Liebman and Samuel Diamond were the only great and honorable slapslappers there who hadn’t quit real for simple. That is one reason why, despite our differences in age—they were both in the third grade—I became such close friends with them so fast.
On the first day of school, I arrived twenty minutes early and went to the fenced-in playground, where scores of early students sat shiva for summer break. Some older boys were playing tournament-style slapslap-to-13 by the bigtoy. They needed a sixteenth, so I volunteered, and they told me I looked like a kindergartner. I said I was a kindergartner, but that I’d been slapslapping for approximately three-fourths of my life, which was true—my mom taught me slapslap before I’d learned to walk (I’m told that from the crib I aborted a round of pattycakes—I don’t remember ever playing pattycakes, but I do get a shake of disgust through my shoulders at the sound of its cloying melody—with a thumb-stab to her wrist, and she, as she explains it, figured, “And so why not?”)—and the older boys let me play, thinking they were humoring me.
I won the first three rounds 13–nothing, but Simon Katz, the sixth-grader I was to face in the championship round, was much better than my first three opponents. I’d watched the last two points of his semi-final. He wasn’t as fast as me, but he was really fast, so I decided I’d mess with him out of the gate.
I won the roshambo for serve (scissors to his paper), and opened with a fake. Simon Katz flinched. I called 1–0 Gurion. “You didn’t slap me, kid,” said Katz. I told him he flinched. “What do you think this is, a nursing home?” he said. I asked him what that was supposed to mean. Simon Katz just said “Tch,” and I figured that he was trying to tell me that he hadn’t flinched, but dodged, the implication being that I’d balked and so it was not 1–0, but either a gimme or a do-over. I figured that when he asked me if I thought we were in a nursing home, he was saying that people in a nursing home often had weak vision, but that he didn’t have weak vision like someone in a nursing home, so if he saw a balk, then a balk there had been.
I knew I hadn’t balked—my fake was all chin—but I also knew there was no way to settle the argument. So I said to Simon: Are we playing do-overs or rotating gimmes?
Simon said, “The score’s 0–0.”
I took that to mean do-overs.
Then I did another chin-fake, and Simon flinched again.
I called 1–0, Gurion.
“What is wrong with this kid?” Simon said to the crowd—this crowd had gathered to watch the finals.
I said, Look, I know I won’t convince you by insisting, but that was not a balk. I didn’t even move my hands. Why don’t you pay attention to my hands instead of my face. And stop calling me kid, because I’m Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, and unless you’re really small for your age, you’re not thirteen yet, so you’re a kid too, and I don’t keep calling you kid, so don’t call me kid.
It was not a very elegant speech—I didn’t know how they talked on the playground yet, and I had yet to learn concision.
Simon Katz was not a dickhead at all, and he immediately ceased to call me kid, but when he said, “Look, Gurion ben-Judah, we play slapslap here, not olden slapslap,” I thought I sensed contempt in the unfamiliar phrase olden slapslap, and the presence of this contempt was then corroborated by some other kid behind me who said, “Olden slapslap is Lame Lamey von Lamey McLamensteinowitz.” The popular X Xey von Xey McXensteinowitz joke-form was unfamiliar to me at that time, and I thought this kid behind me, on top of the contempt for whatever any of them meant by olden slapslap, was expressing contempt for the many syllables of my name.
And I said, You are all a bunch of fuckers.
There was a collective gasp, a giggle or two, and then someone said, “You can’t swear.”
I can’t what? What can’t I do? I said.
The concept of swears was, at that time, also foreign to me.
“You can’t say the eff-word.”
What’s the eff-word?
“The word you just said.” “You called us effers.”
I didn’t call you effers. I called you fuckers. You’re all fuckers, I said. You’re fuckers because you’re not honorable slapslappers and you’re fuckers because of how you make fun of my name, which is a good, strong name my parents gave me, you fuckers.
“That’s a bad word!” they said, and half of them went to the other side of the playground.
The fuck are they scared of? I said.
That is when I first noticed Emmanuel Liebman and Samuel Diamond. They were laughing, and even though I wasn’t laughing, it seemed like they were laughing with me somehow, and that gave me a good, brotherly feeling, so I decided I liked them.
“The eff-word, Gurion ben-Judah,” said Simon Katz, “is the word in the question you just asked that begins with the letter f. It’s a swear.”
No it’s not, I said.
Even though I didn’t know what exactly a swear was, I could of course tell by the context that a swear was bad, and so I knew the word fuck could not be a swear because it was a word my mom used to say a lot. To an Israeli, who has grown up cursing in Arabic, “fuck” seems like fiddlesticks, “fucker” like meanie. How could it be otherwise? When you curse in Arabic at the rock that has stubbed your toe, what you say to the rock is Coos em ach. Coos em ach = Your mother’s cunt. If someone pisses you off a little, and you don’t want to say something too vile, you tell them they’re the offspring of ten thousand donkeys and a whore. I didn’t understand all of that at the time, nor would I til that afternoon, when after Headmaster Unger heard about my saying the word, he yelled and called my parents, and we had a talk, and my mom decided to stop saying fuck so much and so did I. All I knew right then, on the playground, was that my mom said fuck and fucker when she was mad or annoyed, and so it wasn’t, at least to me, a bad word any more than the word bad was a bad word.
It’s not a swear, I said.
“It is,” said Simon.
So what the fuck is a swear then?
“It’s a word bad people say.”
I said, Take it back.
“I can’t take back facts, Gurion ben-Judah.”
I said, Take it back now, you pussing leprosy from between the scabrous vaginal lips of a discount vestigially-tailed prostitute for whom any one of your sixty-seven possible syphilitic fathers were either stupid or crazy enough to pay nearly twice her value for at eighteen cents, fuck.
“Whoa.”
Woe unto you, you filthy crevice-sniffing—
But Simon Katz—a nice boy—was already walking away.
I started choking up because of how everyone I’d met hated me for doing nothing other—at least as far as I could tell—than playing unimpea
chable slapslap and defending my family. I had not had much contact with other kids my age, but I’d always assumed that people who I wanted to be friends with would like me. I sat down in pebbles and took deep breaths, and the sting behind my eyes softened before any tears fell.
Soon, Emmanuel and Samuel sat down beside me and said their names. Samuel told me about simple slapslap, and how it made the two of them angry. Emmanuel seemed more disappointed than angry, and he told me that Simon Katz, though nice, was not very bright; that he believed swears were words that bad people said because his mother, knowing that Simon was so nice and therefore wouldn’t want to be a bad person, had told him so. Then he told me what swears were. “They are words that a large group of people agree are forbidden, and so they are good, for if Adonai’s true name were the only forbidden word, then, other than lying, the only way to rebel by speaking would be to break the Law handed down to us by Adonai, either by saying his true name or taking his lesser ones in vain, and since people must rebel by speaking—it is part of being a person, yes? I know you know that—it is better if they have something other than Adonai’s Law to rebel against. It is better for them to have the option to rebel against the rules of man, which are all, ultimately, imperfect.”
Since they’d sat down with me, Samuel had been whipping pebbles at the bigtoy, Emmanuel absently hoisting fistfuls to shoulder-level and spilling them one- and two-at-a-time into a small pile in the middle of us. When Emmanuel was through speaking, I back-handed one of the spilling pebbles so that it struck one of the whipped ones in mid-air and the ricochet was audible. CLACKSH.
I liked for things to ricochet, but as soon as I’d backhanded that pebble, I worried Emmanuel and Samuel would think I was a show-off. I’d never worried about being a show-off before. I didn’t even know the word “show-off,” but I knew the idea from Torah: Moses wasn’t allowed into Israel because he’d acted like a show-off in the Sinai, during the second water-from-the-rock miracle. The stakes were not that high here, and I had performed no miracle, just an impressive feat of timing and aim, but I had, at least partly, performed the feat to impress them with my timing and aim, when I could have just as easily done it for better reasons: to let them hear a new sound or witness the rare and pretty physics of a missile striking a missile.
They didn’t treat me like a show-off, though. They kept doing what they’d been doing with the pebbles, totally straight-faced. I thought maybe they hadn’t seen, but after Samuel had whipped a couple or three more, he said, “Can you do it again?”
I said, Maybe.
“Try.”
So I did it again. CLACKSH.
They stopped monkeying with the pebbles and slapped me on the back.
Can we be best friends? I said. I really liked them. I said, I think we should be best friends. We all prefer to play slapslap correctly and judging by what I’ve seen this morning, here on the playground, I believe a love of real slapslap is a deeply meaningful affinity to share; the kind of affinity from which friendships of great longevity have the opportunity, if not the impetus, to grow.
Samuel said the beginning of a “Yes,” but Emmanuel cut him off. “Are you a scholar?” he said.
Are you? I said.
“Yes,” they said.
“But that doesn’t make you one,” said Emmanuel. He said, “You have to worry about what things mean. Especially things in Torah.”
I do, I said.
“Like what?” said Emmanuel. He wasn’t acting mistrustful, just cautious.
You know when Jacob tricks Isaac on his deathbed? I said.
“What about it?”
First of all, I don’t think he really tricks him.
Emmanuel said, “A number of great rabbis would agree with you” = “You are not impressing me with originality.”
I said, But I think maybe Adonai gets tricked. By Isaac, though, not Jacob.
“That is a very compelling statement. What would make you say such a thing?”
“He’ll have to explain some other time,” Samuel said. “First bell’s about to ring.”
I’ll explain at recess, I said. I said, But what you asked me was to tell you what I am worried about, which I can do very quickly: I am worried that if Isaac did trick Adonai, then not only would it seem to indicate that Adonai can be tricked, but that maybe He should be tricked sometimes, and I am worried because I don’t know how to trick Him.
“Listen,” said Emmanuel. “You explain this to us after school. At recess, I want you to find Rabbi Salt, the principal of Judaic Studies. He is a very smart man. He teaches second-, fourth-, sixth-, and eighth-grade Torah Study. We’re in fourth-grade Torah Study, Samuel and I, instead of third-, because Rabbi Salt was our teacher last year and he double-promoted us. You need to go see him at recess and get promoted out of kindergarten Torah Study because it’s Rabbi Unger, the headmaster, who is a fool, who teaches kindergarten Torah Study, and you will learn nothing from him but foolishness. I am certain that if you search him out, Rabbi Salt will promote you, at least to second-grade Torah Study, and in the meantime, Samuel and I have Torah Study right after lunch, and we’ll try to convince him to promote you twice again so you can study with us.”
“You know, you’re really socially stunted sometimes,” Samuel told him.
“You’re always saying that, and I never know why.”
“Right. Exactly. Tell him you’re his best friend, already.”
“Why don’t you tell him?”
“He already knows I am, Stunted Stuntedy.”
“I am, too, Gurion,” Emmanuel said.
And I saw that it was good.
We went to Assembly in the multipurpose room together, to line up behind our teachers and pray and be counted.
Territory
No Chicagoland junglegym could beat Schechter’s bigtoy. The bigtoy’s creator, except for (years later) Philip Roth, is the only person I ever wrote a fan letter. Unlike Philip Roth, who thought I was a prankster,******** the bigtoy’s creator was dead. I didn’t find that out til I’d written the letter, though.
How I found out was I approached Headmaster Unger to acquire the creator’s name and address, and Unger told me he couldn’t remember the man’s name, but he knew he was dead, that he’d died on Schechter’s campus on a summer’s day in ’97 or ’98 while overseeing the bigtoy’s construction, but that if I wanted, he (Unger) could look through some receipts to find the name of the man’s company, and from there I could look the name up in the yellow pages and find the company’s address. I asked Unger why he thought I would be interested in something like that, and he told me that although he hadn’t seen the letter I’d written, he knew I must have put effort into writing the letter, and he thought I would prefer not to waste the effort. I still didn’t understand, and I said so. Unger said he was thinking I could send the letter to the creator’s construction company. But the letter, I told him, wasn’t written to the creator’s construction company; it was written to the creator, and I didn’t get why anyone would deliberately send a letter to someone to whom that letter wasn’t written. “So as not to waste effort,” Unger snapped at me. But the effort was already wasted, I told him. Since the letter wasn’t written to the company, to send the letter to the company would just waste more effort: the effort of looking up the address in the yellow pages, the effort of writing it on the envelope, of printing the letter out, of affixing the stamp, and not least of all the effort of whoever in the company would read this letter which didn’t concern him or anyone else at the company still living.
Unger, though able to muffle the contemptous hrumph that his nose made, seemed unable to silence it entirely, and I got the sense that we’d been having a metaphorical kind of conversation without my knowing it, and that I’d insulted him somehow, but at the same time I didn’t feel bad about insulting him, if that’s what I’d done, because that nose-noise—especially because he seemed to have purposely failed at silencing it (how hard is it to hold back a hrumph?) as if to ind
icate that the place from which he just realized he had to condescend to me was so many miles high that he couldn’t, despite all his efforts, even pretend to get fully down to my level—indicated, if nothing else, that his was an M.O. of total penility. If he hadn’t made that noise, I probably would have eventually taken the name of the company from him, and even sent the letter, all the while trusting that Unger’s being an elder of mine granted him access to an understanding of the world that I did not yet have. Instead, I thanked him and returned to lunch.
It might be better that the bigtoy’s creator never read that letter anyway. Having recently reread it myself, I see now how it would’ve been possible, even likely, for the creator to misconstrue my sincere praise as backhanded. It would’ve all depended on what kind of guy he was. The attribute the letter claimed to be most important—the one that made the bigtoy great—was not, I don’t think, an attribute the creator even knew about, much less one he intentionally designed.
Although it’s true a slide descended from each corner of the bigtoy’s platform, and true that all four of these slides were fast, it wasn’t the number of slides or their speed that rendered the bigtoy superlative. And while the 7' x 8' wackywall intersecting the eastern side of the platform had footholds and grips spaced perfect for climbertag, it wasn’t the wackywall either. Neither was it the monkeybar dome that rose ten feet above the platform’s safety railing. Nor the seemingly dangerous wood-and-wire bridge off the platform’s south side, which led to the old castle-themed junglegym (the smalltoy) and creaked loud in the cold and would bounce like a waveform if just two big kids jumped hard and no one else was on it. And certainly the yellow ropenet that sagged between the platform’s north side and four ground-anchors seven feet away was a remarkable achievement in itself—twice as remarkable when you noticed the skewed grey grid of shadow it left on the pebbles, and three times so if you ever saw that shadow go bendy during storms—but remarkable as the ropenet was, even it paled beside the true source of the bigtoy’s superlativeness. All of these aspects combined did. It was not the sum of the bigtoy’s parts that made the bigtoy superlative, but the difference between that sum and the portion of the universe containing it. It was what the bigtoy surrounded.