Whoever was showering in the dormitory bathroom had stopped and was toweling off. The hall door opened and closed, opened and closed; a minty smell of tooth-brushing wafted over from the sinks and into Joey’s stall. His crying had given him a boner that he now removed from his boxers and khakis and held on to for dear life. If he squeezed the base of it really hard, he could make the head of it huge and hideous and almost black with venous blood. He so much liked looking at it, so much enjoyed the feeling of protection and independence its repulsive beauty gave him, that he was reluctant to finish himself off and lose hold of that hardness. To walk around hard every minute of the day, of course, would be to be what people called a prick. Which was what Blake was. Joey didn’t want to be like Blake, but he wanted even less to be his mother’s Designated Understander. With silently spastic fingers, staring at his hardness, he came into the yawning toilet and immediately flushed it.
Upstairs, in his corner room, he found Jonathan reading John Stuart Mill and watching the ninth inning of a World Series game. “Very confounding situation here,” Jonathan said. “I’m experiencing actual pangs of sympathy for the Yankees.”
Joey, who never watched baseball by himself but was amenable to watching it with others, sat down on his bed while Randy Johnson dealt fastballs to a defeat-eyed Yankee. The score was 4–0. “They could still come back,” he said.
“Not going to happen,” Jonathan said. “And I’m sorry, but since when do expansion teams get to play in the Series after four seasons? I’m still trying to accept that Arizona even has a team.”
“I’m glad you’re seeing the light of reason finally.”
“Don’t get me wrong. There’s still nothing sweeter than a Yankee loss, preferably by one run, preferably on a passed ball by Jorge Posada, the chinless wonder. But this is the one year you kind of want them to win anyway. It’s a patriotic sacrifice we all have to make for New York.”
“I want them to win every year,” Joey said, although he didn’t have strong feelings about it.
“Yeah, what’s up with that? Aren’t you supposed to like the Twins?”
“It’s probably mostly because my parents hate the Yankees. My dad loves the Twins
Jonathan gave him an interested look. To date, Joey had disclosed very little about his parents, only enough to avoid seeming annoyingly mysterious about them. “Why does she hate New York?”
“I don’t know. I guess because it’s where she came from.”
On Jonathan’s TV, Derek Jeter lined out to second base, and the game was over.
“Very complex mix of emotions here,” Jonathan said, turning it off.
“You know, I don’t even know my grandparents?” Joey said. “My mom’s really weird about them. My entire childhood, they came to see us once, for like forty-eight hours. The whole time, my mom was unbelievably neurotic and fake. We went to see them one other time, when we were in New York on vacation, and that was bad, too. I’d get these birthday cards three weeks late from them, and my mom would be, like,
Jonathan was frowning thoughtfully. “Where in New York?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere in the suburbs. My grandmother’s a politician, in the state legislature or something. She’s this nice, elegant Jewish lady who my mom apparently can’t stand to be in the same room with.”
“Whoa, say that again?” Jonathan sat up straight on his bed. “Your mom is Jewish?”
“I guess in some theoretical way.”
“Dude, you’re a Jew! I had no idea!”
“Only, like, one-quarter,” Joey said. “It’s really watered down.”
“You could immigrate to Israel right now, no questions asked.”
“My lifelong dream fulfilled.”
“I’m just saying. You could be packing a Desert Eagle, or piloting one of those fighter jets, and dating a total sabra.”
To illustrate his point, Jonathan opened his laptop and navigated to a site devoted to pictures of bronzed Israeli goddesses with high-caliber bandoliers crisscrossing their naked D-cup chests.
“Not my kind of thing,” Joey said.
“I’m not that into it, either,” Jonathan said, with perhaps less than complete honesty. “I’m just saying, if it
“Also, isn’t there a problem with illegal settlements and Palestinians not having any rights?”
“Yes, there’s a problem! The problem is being a tiny island of democracy and pro-Western government surrounded by Muslim fanatics and hostile dictators.”
“Yeah, but that just means it was a stupid place to put the island,” Joey said. “If the Jews hadn’t gone to the Middle East, and if we didn’t have to keep supporting them, maybe the Arab countries wouldn’t be so hostile to us.”
“Dude. Are you familiar with the Holocaust?”
