LeVine didn't have to fake anything. But how he pined to fail on a grand scale. Bigger than the Iberville flunkers, more glorious than One-Ball Blitt, more dangerous than Ricky Frick, more hapless than LeVine's third best friend, Beano Wax.
The Legend of Beano Wax
Benjy “Beano” Wax, a fellow flunker, avid barbecue sauce enthusiast and Batman imposter. Beano was generally a quiet neb with a sad, hound dog countenance...until that is, he’d quaff down a cup of the world famous Iberville Bar-B-Q French fry sauce – then he became Batman.
Everyone loved the famous sauce – but as a condiment on their fries or chicken, not straight up like Beano. He’d chug it down, get high on lard and then drift off into a delusional state where he actually believed that he was Batman. Then Beano would run up and down (preferably staircases) screaming, “Batman” and barf his grease-drenched guts out.
Beaver Beaudoin, the stout buck-toothed school janitor, despised Beano Wax for the obvious reasons. No matter how much a janitor may be in love with his job, and Beaver loved his job like dear life itself, he never gets used to mopping up puke on a regular basis – even if it’s Batman’s. But when Beano barfed on the Quebec flag, Beaver had had enough.
“You can puke on my floor, you can puke on my head, but you cannot puke on my flag. Eider dat putz goes or I go,” Beaver threatened to Principal Resnick.
And that really was a threat to take seriously. Gurion Academy without Beaver? That would be the tragic loss of an institution. Beaver was the most beloved man in the school. He was the heart, the soul, the righteous goy of Gurion Academy.
Who retrieved Mikey Finkelstein’s cherished autographed Hank Aaron baseball when Soupy Segal threw it up on the school roof? Beaver!
Who fished out Marla Greenstein’s retainer from the dreaded third stall in the girl’s bathroom? Beaver!
And whose daughter was it behind the dumpster, off whom Ira Shtern copped his first feel in sixth grade? (And that wasn’t bullshit). Beaver’s!
Principal Resnick acted swiftly and decisively, slapping Beano Wax with a lifetime ban from Iberville
Bar-B-Q. Beaver was temporarily appeased.
And it worked – for two whole weeks. Beano may have had the shakes, but he went cold turkey and the school stairwells remained as pristine and barf-free as an Arctic iceberg. Still, Beano had to answer the call of that little retardo voice from within. His new passion became pencil-case self-mutilation. He’d color his tongue with his cartridge pen (peacock blue was his favorite flavor), pierce his fingers with his compass and stuff pencil erasers in his ears.
There was however, an economic fallout from the Beano Wax sauce ban. He had a thirty five cent a day habit and Tito Carcinomas, the proud and cheap owner of Iberville Bar-B-Q, lamented about his plummeting barbeque sauce sales.
“This is killing my sauce business. The peoples is thinking that somethings wrong with the sauce if Beano no drink it,” he confided to Joey Prager. “I swear on the tomb of my mother in Corfu, that Beano Wax will live again to drink my sauce – even if I have to give it to him for free!”
One day after school Tito lured Beano over to his restaurant, letting him in through the back door. His proposal to Beano: he would supply him with all the sauce he could drink - gratis for one whole month. All Beano would have to do was to drink the elixir of the gods in front of the restaurant.
“Just no be Batman and no puke,” Tito warned. “You puke and I cut your neck...and this for really. I once killed a man in Corfu for just farting in my taverna in the presence of my sainted mother.” Beano prayed that that story really wasn’t true; he just cut a wicked one.
The next day Beano slipped out of school during lunch and procured his contraband cup of sauce. He chugged down his tasty fix with vengeance and then, of course, shifted into auto super-hero mode. He raced down the street back to school, yelling all the while at the top of his lungs, “Baaaaat-maaaaaaannn!” Then he bolted inside the school, charged up the main staircase and screamed,
“Baaaaat-maaaaaaannn!” Naturally Beano hurled and hurled and hurled, over the staircase and down below onto the shiny bald pate of Principal Resnick.
Resnick was feeling magnanimous the day of judgement. The intrepid Goldie Nemitz had just written a flattering profile on him in the Iberville Examiner. Goldie, the voice of Iberville, named Resnick as Iberville’s Educator of the Year and even gave him a box of Bic pens to mark the occasion. He could’ve...he should’ve expelled Beano from Gurion Academy, but since he had a heart, he would give the disturbed boy one last chance – but the kid had to lay off the sauce.
“For Benjamin’s own good,” Resnick told Beano’s parents, “he should repeat the school year.”
Has anything ever done in the name of, “for your own good,” not resulted in disaster? Incredibly, Beano’s dad, Seymour, agreed with Resnick.
“Benjy is a fucken retard, just like your brother, what’s-his-name, the great thespian,” Seymour Wax bitched to his wife, Florrie during the meeting with Resnick.
Ever since Howard Melnick, (stage name: Mel Howard), inherited the entire Melnick fortune of six hundred and seventy thousand dollars and the condo in Florida, Seymour Wax could not bear to utter his brother-in-law’s name.
“Thank God, we’re okay and don’t need the money,” Florrie would say.
“We don’t need the money? Are you crazy? Do you know how tough the fake necktie market is these days?” Seymour answered.
“We’ll get by Seymour. We always do, but Mother was worried for Howard, that he couldn’t make a living. Since when is it a sin that a mother should provide for her son?”
“Since she has a son-in-law in the fake necktie business and a grandson who’s a complete meshuganeh. The great thespian never worked a day in his life. What did he do to deserve all of the inheritance?” But Seymour’s rants were all in vain and he knew it. Florrie Wax, like all Iberville women, would defend their useless baby brothers till the bitter end.
“Howard is no retard,” Florrie explained to Principal Resnick, “he just plays one on his show on CBC.”
“His show, she says,” Seymour Wax spat. “The schlub has a bit part as a retard. Since when does that make it his show?”
Resnick sighed and regretted that he never took that job at the goyische school in Sheffield Heights. Say what you want about goyim, about their drinking and hunting and passion for cars; but they were polite and infinitely easier to deal with than fellow yids.
“Getting back to Benjamin, Mr. and Mrs. Wax. He could use some maturity building. It would be best for everyone if we held him back a year. In the large scheme of things, a year is nothing in the course of a lifetime.”
But the emesse was, that like most of the educators, Principal Resnick’s decision was petty and spiteful.
“Rita,” Resnick told his wife while preparing for sex the night before that meeting, “that fucking little retard Benjamin Wax will pay for puking on my head.”
Resnick slipped on a pair of Rita’s pantyhose and became instantaneously aroused. “I’m going to make an example of that little puke,” Resnick said as he jammed his foot inside one of Rita’s high-heeled shoes. It was a tight fit, but he could squeeze into them. Resnick thanked God that his wife had such large feet. He could never imagine himself, Iberville’s Educator of the Year, shopping at Shoe Biz for stilettos.
“What’s a year?” Before he flunked, Beano Wax was just another mixed-up kid among many in Iberville. No one flunked Chuckie Glick for peeing in a garbage can – of course, Chuckie’s father Barney, owned Jean Stop, a successful chain of seventy stores across Canada. And no one flunked out Manny Isaif for selling bogus fund-raising school chocolate bars; his father was President of the Canadian branch of the Jewish National Fund. But Beano’s father, Seymour Wax was just a pain-in-the-ass schlepper who owned a shitty little company that manufactured fake neckties. Who gave a shit? And they certainly didn’t give a shit for Beano, who was now branded a “flunker,” the modern day version of the village idiot.
“They dropped him on his head when he was a baby.”
“They squeezed the forceps too hard when he was born.”
“His twin brother got both of the brains.”
Fuck what they said. No one in Iberville knew anything, but they were always right. Beano Wax was just a barbeque sauce addict and a little odd – end of story. What could his parents do? Send him to a condiment detox center?
Beano Wax deserved better, and LeVine might have been the only other person to believe that. Maybe it was because both boys flunked out together during the same school year, but Frankie X stood by Beano to the bitter end – and it was a bitter end.
Beano was no retard – LeVine would’ve never hung out with him if that was true. So Beano went a little mental every now and then – who doesn’t?
Beano miserably plodded on through an undistinguished academic career, although he did graduate high school. His father made an effort to get to know him better and took him into his shitty little fake necktie business. And while Beano never moved out of his house, he at least replaced his Batman posters with posters of Farrah Fawcett and Cheryl Tiegs. The man was evolving. Not only that, but he helped his father transform the business from a shitty little fake necktie business, to a nice little real necktie business. To his credit, Beano convinced his stubborn father that fake ties were not only out, but that they were never in.
Meanwhile, Beano squirreled away a tidy sum of money and bought himself a souped-up 1970 green Shelby Mustang. But no matter how hard Beano Wax tried to be cool, to fellow Ibervillians, he would always be “the retarded flunker who pukes barbeque sauce and thinks he’s Batman.” Iberville was an unforgiving place and even on Yom Kippur in synagogue, they’d mock him. Naturally, Beano couldn’t get laid in Iberville, even after he bought his 1970 green souped-up Shelby Mustang.
“Green is for fucking weirdoes,” they said.
Finally during Christmas vacation, when Beano was twenty-one, he ventured out of Iberville, driving down with LeVine to Fort Lauderdale to try to his luck on girls from New Jersey. Maybe they’d do him just for his car? And you know what? They did! He scored, he scored! Halleluiah, Beano Wax scored! Twice. First, with a pug breeder from Poughkeepsie who looked suspiciously part pug, and the second time with a doughy dental assistant from New Jersey named Darlene.
To celebrate, Beano treated all the boys, (actually just his stuttering cousin Reuven Fagen and LeVine), to a rib dinner at Travis Stedry’s, famous for its spicy Texas barbeque sauce. And how good that sauce tasted! Beano barely nibbled at his Flintstonian-sized rack of ribs, before he heartily chugged down three cups of the piquant Texas barbeque sauce.
Then, after dinner, while crossing the street on the main strip, Beano had a relapse. And so he bellowed out to the seraphim above, “Baaaat-maaaan!!!!” Then he had a massive puking attack, so violent in fact, that he collapsed on the street. Tragically, LeVine and Reuven
Fagen couldn’t get Beano up in time, and while lying in a pool of his own vomit in the middle of the intersection, Beano Wax got run over by a speeding black Trans Am.
“At least he got l-l-laid before he d-d-died,” Reuven Fagen told the mourners at the shiva.
At least.
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