He sat at home, awating the inevitable dinner. “We’ll be reading from the Legend this year,” they tell him. “Be nice.”
And he will. He’ll stifle himself when they start chanting. he’ll hold back when they sing. He’ll pretend to know who these people are. He’ll smile at the utterly senile bicentennial woman sitting next to him, as she hands him a piece of Mazzah with a trembling, twiglike hand.
In the meantime, however, he sits and enjoys late-night television. These are the movies that go straight to TV. These are the movies that made him feel sorry that there are only so many words for “awful”. He’d sometimes think about the directors and writers of these movies. He’d wonder if they’d been happy with the final result, smiled at each other, or even patted themselves on the back in a really pathetic “good job!” way, like one would say about a retarded monkey’s finger-painting.
“Are you a fighter?”
“Who wants to know?”
Actual lines from the jail yard scene, in which the new inmate - wrongfully accused, one can assume - finds himself hasseled by the resident prick.
He cried after that scene. He cried for demented old women with shaky hands. And for the directors and writers. He even cried for the retarded monkey. But not for the Israelites in the desert. He didn’t cry for them at all.
