To Be Honest Page 6

  “Now, hey now,” Rabbi Minsky said. “That’s not nice.” This always puzzled me, when dishonest people found it insulting to be described as what they were. If they thought dishonesty was so bad, why did they insist on practicing it? The rabbi sighed and said, “Let’s get started. We have a lot to talk about today.”

  He began lecturing about something much less interesting than fetishism, and at first I felt pretty salty about the whole exchange. But then my feelings shifted and I found it hilarious. As Rabbi Minsky went on, clearly still tense, I kept smiling and occasionally bursting out laughing. He got irritated enough to pause and tell me I seemed distracted. I said, “I’m laughing because I might be more honest than God!”

  Make Fun of Something True

  My new school was close enough to our house that Mom and I walked there, but most of the students arrived in buses. I liked the kids on the buses because they struck me as critical thinkers, unlike the white blond kids back in Claremont who swallowed the ridiculous lies school fed them, who really believed that grades and memorization and pleasing teachers proved your intelligence. These new kids resented the absurdities and injustices of school as much as I did. They told personal stories and cursed and talked dirty, their conversations full of words and sentiments the white kids plainly couldn’t handle.

  Robert and Manuel led the group of friends I most liked, and I followed them around as much as they let me. They regarded me with confusion, but must’ve found me an amusing curiosity. They wore expensive sneakers and baseball hats with sports team names, their hair buzz cut, slicked back, or combed into stiff waves. I didn’t do any of those things. The barbers at Supercuts would ask Dad how he wanted my hair and he’d say, “I’m not a hair expert. Just do what you think is best.” I was the only one in the group who wore glasses. My thick wire-rimmed glasses, at the time, were considered the epitome of nerdiness, and Mom hadn’t changed my clothing style much since kindergarten.

  One day, I was crouched on the playground blacktop with my back against the handball wall, watching them pass a basketball back and forth, racking my brain for a game or conversation topic that would entertain them enough that they’d give up on this boring dribbling.

  Robert chased the ball with each bounce; he was much bigger than the rest of us, moving with the controlled clumsiness of a clownish physical comedian. His huge head bobbed up and down, his round face jolly. He was usually the one who broke any silence, guiding the conversation.

  “Michael’s nasty,” Robert said. “He picks his nose. I saw it.” His friends laughed riotously. I had no complaint about this remark because it was true; I did pick my nose, and it was entirely possible Robert had caught me. “Michael picked his nose and then ate the booger!” Robert continued, darting after the ball.

  “And then he shit out the boogers!” Manuel said. He only spoke when he really had something to say. He was small but athletic and handsome, with thick, sculpted black hair and dimpled cheeks.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “That’s ridiculous.” The boys turned to me with reluctant interest. They’d expected me to respond with a similar jab, to join in the banter. “I believe that you saw me pick my nose,” I told them, rising from the blacktop. “But I obviously didn’t eat my boogers. Why would anyone eat boogers?” The boys looked at each other nervously. “It’s true that if I did eat boogers, they’d come out in my poop. That’s science,” I continued. I considered it evenhanded of me to compliment the part they’d gotten right. The boys laughed at my mentioning shit again and I got the feeling they weren’t catching my meaning. “If you’re gonna make fun of someone,” I concluded, “only make fun of what really happened.”*

  Manuel did a nimble little dance in place and said, “Michael picks his nose! He admitted it!” The boys half-laughed, but the scene felt mirthless and awkward.

  “Of course I pick my nose!” I said. “Everybody does. You do too—”

  “Shut up! No, I don’t!” Manuel interrupted, his fists suddenly clenched, his face taut. “Take it back!”

  “Come on, Manuel, you’re really trying to tell me that you’ve never picked your nose?” I turned to the others and said, “Does anybody believe that Manuel has never picked his nose?”

  “Shut up!” Manuel shouted, stepping close to intimidate me.

  I continued addressing the other boys. “See how Manuel is threatening to punch me?” Then I parroted what Dad had told me about displays of masculinity. “He’s pretending to be tough to hide his embarrassment. He’s so ashamed of picking his nose that he can’t handle someone acknowledging it.”

  “Shut up!” Manuel said again, too upset to think up a comeback.

  “If he was really tough, he wouldn’t care. He’d admit he picks his nose. He’s too scared to express his feelings. That’s why all he says is ‘shut up.’”

  “Shut up!” Manuel sputtered.

  I laughed and pointed. “See, that’s funny.” No one else was laughing so I tried to explain, but they still didn’t see the humor. I sighed, “Make fun of true things, okay? And only make fun of what isn’t also true about you. For example, you can make fun of me about wearing glasses because I wear glasses and you don’t.” I thought more. “Or because I’m clumsy and I hurt myself every time I play sports. Because you guys aren’t as clumsy.” I thought of more things that were unique to me that they might ridicule. “And I cry about everything. And I like girls. And I try to talk to them and they run away.” The boys watched me in a horrified trance. I felt so energized that I started stepping back and forth in random directions, an awkward, chaotic hopscotch. “And my shoes are from Payless. And I have freckles and I’m ugly. And I get good grades and I’m a nerd. And I don’t like the games everyone likes.” Confessing my flaws felt unexpectedly powerful. If I could accept all the unfortunate truths about myself, no one could embarrass me by mocking them. My words sped up and rose in volume as if I were delivering an inspiring, climactic speech. “And I don’t use gel! And no one laughs at my jokes! And I have no friends! And I don’t like wearing a hat!” In the desolate silence that followed, an idea struck me. “Hey!” I said, hopping on my toes. “I invented a new game that maybe all of us would like!” Manuel shifted weight from his right leg to his left and back. A couple boys instinctively backed away. Others listened in dread. “Let’s take turns telling true things about ourselves that could be made fun of!”

  That weekend, I told Dad this story and how they’d run off to get away from me. He said, “Wow, these kids are so immature!”*

  Checkmate

  Dad and I still played chess in his record room in our new house in the San Fernando Valley. By age ten, I’d been losing dozens of games each weekend for six years. These thousands of losses had dulled my chess-related emotions; nothing felt more commonplace and expected than losing.

  One game, I spotted an opening to fork Dad’s bishop and queen with my knight. Because I’d never before had such an opportunity, I assumed I had to be overlooking something, that Dad was luring me into brilliant trap. I scoured the board for any threat to that square and didn’t see any. It appeared Dad had made a mistake. My hand shook as I slid my knight into place. I continued scrutinizing the board as I moved, not yet taking my hand off. Dad’s expression betrayed no recognition of his blunder, or sign that he was impressed by my exploiting it. I took my hand off the knight.

  “Well, look at that,” Dad said. “I’m in trouble.” Dad surveyed the board, tapping his fingers on the carpet. This went on for a while. “I don’t think there’s anything I can do,” he said. He searched the board some more and determined he couldn’t protect one piece without endangering the other. He gave up, moved his queen away, and I took his bishop without any sacrifice of my own. This was my first time in a chess game experiencing a moment of advantage.

  As the game continued, Dad’s playing became erratic and unconsidered. He lost more pieces unnecessarily and said, “I don’t think I can recover, but let’s play out the rest of the game any
way.”

  When I checkmated him, he flicked over his own king. I’d knocked over my king thousands of times, but it threw me off to see Dad do it. I’d always hated that gesture. We both already knew who had lost; I didn’t see why we had to add this symbolic moment of submission. Watching Dad topple his king felt even worse than toppling my own.

  As the king’s rocking slowed, I watched Dad, in suspense about what he would say. “Want to play again?” he asked, exactly as he always did.

  “Yeah,” I told him.

  “Okay,” he said, already lining up his pawns.

  I picked up pieces too and began arranging them. “I thought you’d say something about me finally beating you.”

  Dad didn’t stop setting up the pieces. “What did you think I’d say?”

  “I thought you’d say that it was worth it that you never played easy on me,” I said. “Because now I can be sure that I really won.”

  “You know that already,” Dad said. “Why would I point out what you already know?”

  I scratched my head. “I guess I thought you’d say you were proud of me or something.”

  Dad laughed uncomfortably. “Beating me isn’t much of an accomplishment,” he said. “I’m not even good at chess.”

  The Falsely Accused

  The first week of sixth grade, Mr. Gelman and Mrs. Johnson announced that a crime had been committed and that class wouldn’t continue until someone confessed. The class remained silent as Mr. Gelman, pink, bald, and enormously tall, and Mrs. Johnson, elderly, hunched, and dead-eyed, called on Manuel, Robert, and their friends, interrogating them in front of the class, asking things like, “So, Manuel, do you have anything you’d like to tell us?” And “Well, Robert, I have to say, you look pretty nervous.”

  I interrupted. “What was the crime?”

  Mrs. Johnson replied, “They know what they did.”

  I’d spent a few years at this school already aware that the white teachers mistreated the black and Mexican kids. To me, it was impossible to miss. The teachers spoke to them in harsher, colder, more suspicious voices. When they raised their hands to answer a question, the teachers called on them with condescension and skepticism. In fact, whenever a teacher spoke one of their names, it was with a tone of accusation or punishment, to humiliate them for not knowing something or not paying attention. I noticed that the kids with the darkest skin were treated worst. I’d brought up these observations with Robert and Manuel and their friends many times, but they clearly didn’t want to discuss the subject.

  With all that Dad had taught me about the justice system, America’s racist history, and the methods police and lawyers used to trick the innocent into confessing or make the innocent seem guilty, I knew what a racist sham trial sounded like, and one was happening in my sixth grade class.

  “You have to explain the charges,” I said, interrupting Mrs. Johnson. “And the only reason you’re trying to get a confession is because you don’t know who did it or you have no evidence.” I expected the class to laugh, but they were unresponsive, probably stressed out.

  Mr. Gelman ignored me and ordered Robert to follow him into the hall. In only a few minutes, he returned saying it was all over now and we could continue class. “Wait,” I said. “How do you know it was Robert?” Mr. Gelman said something else about how it was all over now, but it wasn’t over for me. “If you knew from the start that it was Robert, you wouldn’t have gone around class interrogating people. Did you blame him without evidence?” The teachers ignored me, left me fuming in my seat.

  When Robert returned the next day, I asked him what happened. They’d sent him to the principal for graffiti in the bathroom and called his parents. On the playground, Robert told us, “I still don’t even know what the graffiti was like, if it was words or a picture or anything!” He told us he didn’t do it, but said the principal and his parents didn’t believe him.

  “Your parents trust the teachers more than you!?!” I asked, appalled by the thought.

  It wasn’t long before Mr. Gelman and Mrs. Johnson stopped class for another interrogation. This time they said something about a stolen candy bar and once again directed their questions exclusively to Manuel and Robert and their friends.

  “Why do you always accuse the same people?” I asked, knowing why.

  Mrs. Johnson asked to talk to me in the hall. I immediately started crying, which she naively mistook as a sign I’d fold, a common misinterpretation. My tears were a manifestation of anger and should have been taken as a warning that I was about to become aggressive and merciless.

  “Michael Leviton,” Mrs. Johnson said in the hall, “you can’t talk like that.”

  “It’s school. We’re allowed to ask questions,” I said. “Teachers are supposed to answer.”

  Mrs. Johnson remained callous and unmoved. “Those boys are a bad influence on you,” she said. “You should stay away from them.”

  “You blame whoever isn’t white,” I said through my tears. “Just like the newspapers.”

  Like Mrs. Racine a couple years before, Mrs. Johnson clearly wanted to punish me, but something mysterious prevented her. My previous best guess had been that these teachers feared me telling the principal my side of the story because I spoke well enough that I might be believed. In this moment, I put together that Robert could speak clearly too, but that the teachers didn’t worry about anyone believing him. The answer flooded through me: they didn’t punish me because of the color of my skin.

  In an unprecedented rage, I told Mrs. Johnson this realization. She kept repeating that Robert and Manuel were bad kids.

  “How do you know?” I asked again. “What’s your evidence?”

  “I know what kind of kids they are,” Mrs. Johnson said, eyeing the classroom door, preparing to make a run for it.

  “All you know is they’re not white.”

  Like Mrs. Racine before her, Mrs. Johnson fled, hurried back into class, leaving me crying in the hall. I followed Mrs. Johnson back inside and found that the interrogation had run its course undeterred while she kept me occupied. I sat back down at my desk, consumed by plotting what I’d do differently next time.

  I now understood that my teachers feared embarrassment more than they feared being immoral. They were emotionally unprepared to be questioned or exposed; that left them vulnerable, fragile. Mrs. Johnson and Mr. Gelman had already shown me that they wouldn’t send me to the principal. Besides, I’d already told my parents about the racism I’d witnessed and I knew they’d support any attempt to stop it. My lack of respect for authority and total comfort about confrontation meant Mr. Gelman and Mrs. Johnson had no way to make me shut up.

  I told Robert and Manuel about all of this, but they wouldn’t look at me.* Robert said that I never got in trouble because I was the teacher’s pet. I started crying, insisting Robert had seen how I hated the teachers, how I called them out. They remained unresponsive to all my best arguments, so through tears I assured them that next time the teachers interrogated the class, they’d see.

  It wasn’t long before my teachers held the class hostage over some new crime. I immediately asked Mrs. Johnson outright why she didn’t accuse the white kids.† Mrs. Johnson and Mr. Gelman acted as if I hadn’t said anything. “Why aren’t you asking me if I did the graffiti?” They didn’t respond to that either. The fact that I was crying in no way hindered my assault.† “Why are these questions so hard for you? Why are you afraid to answer?”

  Eventually, Mrs. Johnson acknowledged me, saying, “Michael, you’re being distracting.”

  I said, “I’ll be quiet if you’ll be honest.”

  * Despite all this discussion about the differences between a person’s reality, what they presented the world, and how they were perceived, it somehow never occurred to me to consider how I’d be seen.

  * I think it’s safe to say this was the worst advice I ever received. Wrong or right, these were the lessons I learned and the style in which I was taught. Please keep them in mind in
case you want to forgive me for obnoxious things I do later.

  * Dad had an unpleasant habit of asking literal questions without realizing they sounded rhetorical. It was a habit I’d, unfortunately, inherit.

  † Mom and Dad were my only readers.

  * I’m now aware that Mrs. Racine probably didn’t give her students specific comments because she was overworked. She’d probably read fifty student stories and didn’t want to admit that she had no memory of mine. But if someone had been there to direct my attention to this possibility, I would have replied without compassion, “Why didn’t she just say that?”

  * This may sound like a joke, but he was not joking.

  * I can only imagine how bizarre it must have been to deal with me at age nine—this joyfully argumentative nerd smiling through his gratuitous sermons.

  * It wasn’t until I was much older that I recognized the ridiculousness of referring to nine-year-olds as “immature.”

  * I didn’t have the perspective to understand what these kids were going through and why they wouldn’t want to talk about it.

  † It didn’t occur to me that I might be embarrassing or disturbing or endangering the kids I thought I was helping. I spoke the truth recklessly; I found honesty’s destruction unpredictable.

  † In the moment, I envisioned myself as powerful, but I’m sure my questions read as whimpers.

  Chapter 3

  Teenage Truths

  At thirteen, I was old enough that Dad would take me to concerts a few times a week with free tickets from work, mostly to see acts I’d not yet heard of: Ray Davies, Neil Young, X, Rufus Thomas, Joni Mitchell, the Allman Brothers, Bradford Marsalis, Ministry, Mose Allison, the Grateful Dead. The bus to and from junior high played KROQ, providing me with my first opportunity to discover music on my own. Because Dad listened to everything new that came out, he’d already heard every new band I could find.