Finding the Worm (3 page)

“Did you miss me?” I asked.

“Didn’t think you’d make it.”

“It wasn’t even close,” I said.

We sat quiet for a couple of minutes, listening to the rattle of the bus. I could feel my heartbeat coming down and the air coming back into my lungs.

Then, at last, Lonnie said, “If it’s bugging you, you know who you should ask?”

“If what’s bugging me?”

“Heaven.”

“Who should I ask?”

“Magoo.”

The bus hit a huge pothole right after he said that, which knocked us into the air and sprawled us out across the backseat. It sounds stupid, but that jolt convinced me to ask Magoo.

Rabbi Salzberg got a real scrunched-up
look on his face when I asked him about heaven. He’s pretty scrunched up to begin with—the kids at Gates of Prayer Temple and Hebrew School call him Rabbi Magoo. (It’s not a respectful thing, to compare a rabbi with a cartoon character, except he really and truly does look like Mr. Magoo.) But when I asked him about heaven, he got an especially scrunched-up look, like he’d just bitten into the sourest pickle ever.

I was standing in front of the big wooden desk in his office, which always has, like, a blanket of dust on it, and he was sitting on the other side with his hands folded.

“How’s that any of your business?” he said. “Why
don’t you wait until after your bar mitzvah to worry about that?”

“But my bar mitzvah is next month,” I said.

“Worry about your haftarah!”

So then I told him about Quentin, about how he might not be able to come to my bar mitzvah since he was in the hospital, and how no one knew how long he’d have to stay there. I even told him about the tubes going in and out of him and the bandages around his head. I blurted out the whole thing, and I got real emotional talking about it.

You’d think hearing about what Quentin was going through would change the look on Rabbi Salzberg’s face. But he stayed scrunched up the entire time. Then, after I got to the end, he looked me straight in the eye and said, “So you’re worried your friend is going to die and go to heaven?”

“Yes, Rabbi.”

“Worry about your haftarah!”

“Rabbi, I have it
memorized
.”

“Do you think that’s the purpose of haftarah—to memorize words? What do the words
mean
?”

“I don’t know what they mean, Rabbi. The words are in Hebrew.”

“You’re in Hebrew school, aren’t you?”

“But that’s not the kind of Hebrew we learn.”

“Mr. Twerski, when you’re standing up on that stage, reading the words of your haftarah, you’ll be leading the congregation. Your family and friends will be listening to you. You’ll be their guide.”

“They don’t know what the words mean either.”

“Then
make
them understand. Be their guide.”

“Lonnie got bar mitzvahed last year,” I said. “Do you think he understood a word he was saying? But he made it through okay. You even told him what a good job he did. He said his haftarah, and I’ll say my haftarah.”

“No two haftarahs are the same.”

“I know,” I said. “Mine’s half a page longer than his was. We compared them side by side. I don’t think that’s real fair, but I guess it’s the luck of the draw.…”

“No two are the same because haftarah is more than just the words. That’s the reason you have to study it. You have to let it become part of you, let it beat in your heart. You have to
learn
it, and then you have to
live
it. Study your haftarah, Mr. Twerski. Let God worry about Quentin.”

“But you still haven’t answered my question.”

“What was your question?”

“Is there a heaven?” I said.

“Are you Jewish?”

That kind of caught me off guard, since we were talking about my bar mitzvah. I figured it had to be a
trick. I thought it over for a couple of seconds, then said, “I think I am.”

“You
think
so? That’s it?”

“I’m getting bar mitzvahed.”

“That’s your only proof?”

I thought for another couple of seconds. “Well, I’m standing here talking to you, and you’re a rabbi.”

“What about your last name? Twerski sounds Jewish, doesn’t it? So you must be Jewish. That’s a logical conclusion, am I right?”

I nodded.

He slammed his fist down on the desk. “So you’re Jewish because of logic?”

“Well, no, not
just
because of logic—”

He jumped to his feet, rushed around from behind his desk, and grabbed me by the shoulders. He smelled of cigarettes and fish, but I knew enough to take a deep breath and hold it as soon as he got out of his chair. He shook me a couple of times by the shoulders, then poked his right index finger into my chest. “What about what’s in
here
? What about what’s in your
heart
?”

“I’m Jewish in there too,” I said, breathing out as I did.

He pulled back his finger. “That’s good to hear.”

I watched him walk back around his desk and sit down.

When he saw I hadn’t moved, he shook his head. “Yes?”

“You still didn’t tell me whether or not there’s a heaven.”

“Are you asking what I
believe
, or what the Torah
says
?”

“Is there a difference?”

“No.”

“No, there’s no difference? Or no, you don’t believe in heaven?”

He almost, but not quite, smiled at that. “I’m sure God will look after your friend.”

“But I want to know—”

“Judaism isn’t about what you believe,” he said. “It’s about who you
are
, about how you
act
. If you ask a hundred rabbis about heaven, you’ll get a hundred different answers.”

“But there are only two answers, Rabbi. You either believe in heaven, or you don’t.”

“Maybe you should become a lawyer, Mr. Twerski.”

I nodded again, even though it didn’t sound like a compliment.

“The Torah doesn’t tell us what happens after we die,” he said. “It tells us to worry about the here and now. Your bar mitzvah. That’s a good example of the here and now. That’s what I suggest you focus on.”

“Can you at least tell me your opinion?” I said.

He took a deep breath. “Here’s my opinion, Mr. Twerski. I believe in heaven, and I believe in hell. I think heaven and hell are full of people just like us, except
without elbows. The people in heaven and hell are sitting in front of long banquet tables—like at the reception after your bar mitzvah. But these tables go on and on forever, because heaven and hell are much bigger than one bar mitzvah reception.”

“Why don’t the people in heaven have elbows? That seems unfair.”

“It doesn’t matter—”

“I mean, I can understand why the people in hell don’t have elbows—”

“Focus, Mr. Twerski!”

“All right,” I said.

“So the people in heaven and the people in hell are sitting at long banquet tables, and the tables are loaded up with the most delectable food in the world—kosher, of course!—but no one has elbows, so they can’t get the food to their mouths. But here’s the difference. In heaven, the people feed one another, so everyone feasts. But in hell, the people are concerned only with themselves, so everyone starves. That’s heaven and hell, in my opinion.”

I rolled that over in my mind, tried to picture it. “Couldn’t the people in hell just stick their faces in the food?”

“No!”

“Why not?” I said. “If they’re sitting at the banquet table, and the banquet table is loaded up with food, why
couldn’t they just stick their faces straight into the food and eat that way? It would be real messy, for sure. But what do they care? They’re in hell. How much worse could things get?”

Rabbi Salzberg stared at the ceiling and folded his hands together as if he was praying. After a couple of seconds, he looked back down at me. He had that sour-pickle expression again. “Mr. Twerski, you asked me my opinion, and I told you. Now go home, and study your haftarah.”

“But—”

“Go!”

I turned around and walked toward the door.

Once I was out the door, he called after me, “I’m sorry about your friend, Mr. Twerski.”

No one calls me Mr. Twerski except
the rabbis at Gates of Prayer. Ninth graders sometimes call me Twerski when they pass me in the hall at McMasters, if they bother to talk to me, or Twerp, because it kind of sounds like Twerski—plus it’s an insult, which is what ninth graders like. The rest of the world calls me Julian, which is my first name, or sometimes Jules, because it’s shorter.

Lots of people know who I am on account of this long diary thing I wrote last year, which got passed around quite a bit. It was about running fast and skipping a report on Shakespeare and other stuff that happened back in sixth grade.

My English teacher, Mr. Selkirk, wrote an article about it for the PTA newsletter, and then the
Long Island Press
got wind of it and printed a story about how a kid from P.S. 23 wrote a book. Which I didn’t. But it was long—you wouldn’t believe how long if I told you. (Nine composition books long!) I’ve gotten a few months of junior high school under my belt since then, and I’ve grown up a lot, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss good old Selkirk every now and then. But what can you do? Life goes on.

Junior high is another world, of course. The difference between sixth grade and junior high is like the difference between a fishbowl and an aquarium, and ninth graders never let seventh graders forget who are the sharks and who are the guppies. They’ll come up behind you and snag your books as soon as look at you. Nothing cracks up a ninth grader more than knocking loose a seventh grader’s textbooks and binders and watching his stuff go tumbling and fluttering down a flight of stairs. Once you get past snagging books, chewing with their mouths open, and making farting noises with their armpits, there’s not much more to say about ninth graders.

But of course there’s got to be a worst of the worst, the absolute
ninth-est
of ninth graders, and at McMasters Junior High, that would be Devlin. If you want to picture him, think of a scraggly blond mop, except a mop has more meat on its bones and more brains in its mophead.

Devlin was the first guy to snag my books, on the first day of classes, and after he did it, he yelled, “Suh-nag!” Like the word had two syllables. “Suh-nag” is the ninth-grade version of “What are you going to do about it?” (What I did about it, in case you’re curious, was pick up my books and then walk up the stairs to my next class.)

Devlin has a thing against me, by the way. Last June, I was out on a date for the very first time with a girl named Jillian—who, it turned out, he liked, and who, it turned out, also liked him. In the end Devlin kind of took over the date I had with Jillian, and he and Jillian wound up together. Which somehow, in his mophead of a brain, means I did him wrong. You’d have to be a ninth grader to makes sense of it. But here’s the punch line: Jillian got zoned to a different junior high, nearer where she lived, so now she’s not with Devlin, and she’s not with me, and the only time I think about her is when Devlin glares at me in the hallways at McMasters.

So ninth graders are the worst, and Devlin is the worst of the worst. Eighth graders aren’t quite as foul as ninth graders. They’re kind of at an in-between stage—like milk that’s about to go cheesy, but if you’re thirsty enough, you think that maybe it’s still drinkable.

I’m in the Fast Track Program, which means I’ll skip eighth grade next year and go straight to cheese. (Except I won’t, since I’ll remember what it’s like.) It also means
I’ll wind up a year ahead of the rest of the guys from the block: Lonnie, Quentin, Eric the Red, Howie Wartnose, and Shlomo Shlomo. That’s the entire Thirty-Fourth Avenue gang. We’re not a
gang
gang—I mean like the Hells Angels. But we’ve been friends forever, and there’s stuff that’s happened with us that no one else knows about, so it’s hard for an outsider to join in.

That’s why—to get to the point—it would’ve felt wrong to go ahead with my bar mitzvah while Quentin was still sick. How could I have said the Hebrew words and not thought about Quentin lying in that hospital? It would’ve killed me every time I glanced down at the front row of the congregation, every time I noticed he wasn’t there. If Rabbi Salzberg hadn’t called my dad a couple of hours ago and suggested pushing back the bar mitzvah from January to the end of May, I’m sure my dad would’ve decided to do it on his own.

The four of us—Mom and Dad, me and Amelia—were sitting around the dinner table when the call from Rabbi Salzberg came. You could hear the relief in my dad’s voice even before he hung up the phone.

It was bitter cold this morning when
I met Lonnie for the walk to school. The trip from the corner of Thirty-Fourth Avenue and Parsons to the front door of McMasters is about three-quarters of a mile—eight avenues north and five streets east. Lonnie and I sometimes walk it, sometimes ride the bus. The rest of the guys almost always ride the bus, especially during the winter. I was glad it was just me and Lonnie today, since I had to let him know the bar mitzvah was on hold until the end of May. He nodded when I told him—what else could he do but nod? It’s not like I had to say why.

We went another few blocks without talking, just thinking thoughts. Then, to break the mood, he began
razzing me about how much extra work I’d have to do on my haftarah. “With your brains, you’ll know the thing backwards. You should do that, Jules! You should learn it backwards and then say it backwards in temple. Who’s going to know?”

“C’mon, you know who’d know.”

“I’m telling you, Magoo’s going to make you say it standing on one foot. He’s not going to let up until you cry uncle.”

“Then I’ll just cry uncle and get it over with.”

“You might be a rabbi yourself by the time you’re done with it.”