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| Tuesday, July 03, 2007 |
AJL Short Fiction: The Cutbusters
Based on somewhat actual events, a semi-true tale about a little Jewish boy and his hare-brained idea to make a little money.
From our July/August 2007 issue
That’s it. I’m naming names. I’ve been a stand-up guy for more than twenty years, but it is long past time that I shared the
truth with the world. Consider this my confession.
Part of what compels me to take this dangerous and, I’m just going say it, heroic, step, is the bitterness I still feel from the day of my trial in front of my peers that would stigmatize me for the rest of my life.
The trial took place in the small chapel that my elementary school, Beth Yeshurun, a very large Conservative school located in my hometown of Houston, Texas, used for services on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. On Tuesday and Thursday we prayed in the bigger sanctuary. Or maybe it was the other way around. A lot of time has passed. The important thing is that I get this monkey off my back.
The small chapel was shaped like a horseshoe. The students sat on steps around the horseshoe, and the ark of the covenant stood facing us all. If the ark had been a stake in the ground, and the congregation an actual horseshoe, God would have been rewarded maximum pointage for this toss. It was a pretty cozy place.
And there I sat in front of the entire, currently horseshoe shaped third grade and the holy Torah. The principal sat next to me. A few teachers flanked her. Witness after witness testified against me, as the entire grade looked on.
These were the facts with which I agreed:
My best friend Sam Apple and I had started a club called “Cutbusters”.
We caused a frenzy of teary-eyed third graders trying to join our club. I clearly remember standing by the jungle-gym with a piece of paper and a pen while people lined up to try to get on the waiting list to be a member. That’s right. We had a waiting list.
I put chubby little Lonnie Weisblum on the waiting list. I guess he thought that I had forgotten that he had taken a swing at me in second grade when I asked him if he thought Ms. Epstien was mean. Like I could have a loose cannon like that in my organization.
And finally, I even conceded that after getting a call from the principal, Sam’s father had found $56 hidden in a sock deep in the corner of Sam’s closet. Not only did I admit the money was ours, but I admitted that we had collected it from Cutbuster members.
 The bone of contention was the method of collections. The teachers and principal insisted several times that I was collecting dues in exchange for membership. Every time they said that, I surveyed the crowd, with a steely look and replied, “They were donations.”
Looking back, I can see why at the initial meeting with the principal she had told my mom over the phone, “I thought I was calling in a kid who had been selling bubblegum or candy, but what I have here is Sonny Corleone.”
It really didn’t matter what I said. I knew my goose was cooked days before when I saw Sharon Brown standing on an upside down bucket in the alley by the equipment shed on the playground screaming, “Join the Cutbusters! Step right up and join the Cutbusters!”
Splinter groups had been springing up under the “Cutbuster” banner all around school. I knew that watering down the brand name couldn’t be good. There was even a group called “Anti-Cutbusters”.
Not to mention, Sharon Brown was in the low class. At Beth Yeshurun, students were divided into a caste system. There was a high class, a middle class, and a low class.
The high class would socialize with the middle class, but we knew we were smarter than them.
Nobody dealt with the low class. It was composed of freaks and foreigners. It didn’t matter how smart you were. If you moved to Houston from a foreign country, you got stuck in the low class. It didn’t even matter if you came from an English-speaking country.
My friend Alon Elk got stuck in the low class when he came to America from South Africa. He has a master’s degree from Oxford now. He once told me that when he found out he was moving to America, he memorized all of the U.S. geography and history that he could so he would fit in. But it didn’t matter. They put him in the low class. And if you were in the low class, you were virtually an untouchable. So suffice it to say, having Sharon Brown standing out there doing her own personal little membership drive kind of told me that the end was near.
It wasn’t long before the teachers heard I was taking money from members. That’s what led to the trial. Once they heard about the cash, they called both of our parents.
Sam’s father told them, “Sam would never do that.” But he did. And Sam’s dad soon found the money.
Lucky for Sam, his golden boy reputation and the fact that nobody had actually seen him speak since about 1978 made sure that he somehow never got in trouble. How come I was the only one who got a severe deduction in my conduct grade on my next report card? Sam still got the highest possible mark. Did he make a deal? Did he go Sammy “The Kosher Bull” on me?
That’s all academic now. There I sat and met my punishment in front of a crowd of kids whom only days before would have literally paid to sit next to me in the Mandel Weiner Auditorium that served as the lunchroom. But today they sat silently as I was convicted in a kangaroo court composed of teachers who had been out to get me since the cheese on the walls of the lunchroom incident that they could never make stick. I thought I was Teflon. But like Gotti, they just kept after me until they found something that stuck. They couldn’t handle seeing me living so well while they were stuck with a teacher’s salary.
At one point, I was pulling in five, maybe six dollars a week. I had my mom upgrade from Oreos to Double Stuff Oreos. How do you think that made my teachers feel?
At the end of the trial, everybody that had, ahem, contributed to the kitty, lined up and told the principal how much they had given. I had to count out and return the money. Some kids even got me for more than they ever contributed. That slimy Kevin Pauly still owes me 76 cents, the way I see it. I hope he got witness protection.
But at this point, there is no need to be cute. I admit everything.
I, along with Sam Apple, currently a darling of the Jewish literary world, was the mastermind behind a criminal organization that spanned across an entire Jewish elementary school in 1984. Well, at least the third grade.
It all started at the indoor pool of the Jewish Community Center, where Sam and I were thumbing through some sort of a mail-order catalogue. As our eyes, which were apparently still too young to be interested in Victoria’s Secret, scanned the toy section of this random department store catalogue that we probably found in the old, gross JCC snack bar known for its overpriced falafel and an Israeli guy named “Halo” behind the register infamous for short-changing his pre-pubescent clientele, both of our gazes became locked on the same item.
It was a boom box. It transformed into a robot. We had to have it.
I can’t remember how much it cost, but I am guessing it must have been more than a hundred dollars. To my nine-year-old mind, the idea of being able to attain a hundred dollar item was about the same as how a few years later, my 16-year-old mind would view my chances of landing a night with a Playboy bunny. It was a dream worth having over and over, to be sure, but at the end of the day, I knew it could never happen.
But Sam and I were determined. We would not be denied.
We sat on the bleachers by the indoor pool, and tried to come with an idea. The steam from the pool must have given us a contact high, because we formulated a plan that was pretty cunning for a pair of kids who hadn’t reached their double-digits yet. That plan was to become my first hare-brained scheme in a life that turned out to be a long series of hare-brained schemes.
I can’t help it. I have always been a sucker for a good hare-brained scheme.
We decided to start “Cutbusters” for two reasons: We were required to walk in single-file lines from class to class at school. Cutting was a problem. The Cutbusters would fix that problem. Of course, as a Cutbuster, you pretty much had free reign to do whatever you wanted. That was a definite perk.
The second reason was that the name seemed cool at the time, which is hard to believe. But Ghostbusters was huge back then. The name had cache. Marc Brenner even had his mother make us shirts.
The fact that people were willing to make, and I stress this, optional donations, to join, was the icing on the cake.
At the end of the day, I learned very early on that crime doesn’t pay. I had to return every last dime that I had collected. I even had to return the $12 that our biggest contributor, Richard Perel, made to the collection. We immediately made him vice-president of the club after that, but unfortunately he overheard Sam and I discussing the fact it was essentially a powerless figurehead position. He immediately quit and demanded his money back. When we refused, he started the Anti-Cutbusters, which had a pretty decent membership.
It really hurt counting out that $12. Richard never looked at me the same way again. I am pretty sure that is why he sabotaged our fantasy football league championship game last year.
Before I returned the money, the teachers told me how appalling it was that I would make my friends pay dues. They said it was a form of extortion.
Personally, I just think that they are all lucky that I had no idea about the nudie bars all around Houston at the time. If I had, there would not have been any money to return.
-- Text by Mason Lerner / Illustration for AJL by Drew Beam
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