I was always a bad Jew.

Come Passover, the Jewish kids at my elementary school (all ten of them) had to eat peanut butter and jelly on matzo for lunch. Me? I rocked roast beef on a Kaiser roll. Not because I was trying to be a dick—that’s just what my mom packed me for lunch. We marked the Jewish holidays with a big dinner at Grandma’s house. Sometimes we had brisket and potato pancakes. Other times we had a ham. My family is 100 percent Jewish, but other than guilt from mom and the occasional burst of Yiddish from Grandma, the most Jewish thing about me is the fact that I’m circumcised. When it came to the real deal, nitty-gritty Jew stuff, we skipped it. Bar Mitzvah? Never had one. Shabbat? What the fuck is that?

So the other Jewish kids resented me like hell. But it didn’t really matter—like I said, there were only a handful of them to begin with, and the ones that didn’t have asthma kept Kosher, so there wasn’t much fun to be had in that circle anyway.

Despite that, I ended up becoming pretty good friends with this one kid named Jacob. His mom would only serve us Kosher snacks and caffeine-free Coke, but they had a ton of Nintendo games that more than made up for it. For most of 3rd grade, if they weren’t at Temple, I was at their house playing Contra. Things were a little different at their place. When we wanted a snack, we didn’t just go to the pantry and grab a Twinkie. Instead, Jacob would ask his mom if we could have some food. Then she’d bang around in the kitchen for a little while and come out with something: cut up apples, celery with peanut butter, Kosher pizza with weird cheese on it. It wasn’t unpleasant, really. Just different.

His parents never forced religion on me or anything, but there was always the unmistakable feeling that I was walking on thin ice at their house. I had regular soda at my house. I had cable; Jacob had asthma. It was a delicate situation. My place as a guest in their home was provisional, but I didn’t know that at the time. Had I known, I probably wouldn’t have suggested we play “gas chamber.”

We were sitting in his basement one day, halfheartedly playing with Legos, when inspiration struck.

“What do you wanna do now?” he asked me.

“I don’t know,” I replied, scanning the room.

Among the various odds and ends that Jacob’s family had crammed into their basement over the years, there was a phone booth sitting silent and unused in the back corner. It was unremarkable, really. It didn’t even have a phone in it anymore. When you closed the door, a little fan whirred inside and a light bulb turned on, illuminating the booth. That was about it. I walked over and closed the door. The fan whirred and the light bulb shone over my head. I opened it up again, and the light and the fan switched off.

Eureka.

“Let’s play gas chamber!” I said.

Jacob looked at me, slightly puzzled. “What’s that?”

“One of us will be the Nazi, and the other will be the Jew!” I explained. “One of us will put the other one in, and when you close the door the gas comes out and you die!”

I don’t remember it taking much persuasion: a game is a game to a 3rd grader, and it wasn’t long before we were taking turns throwing each other into the “gas chamber,” starting our own little Dachau right in his basement. After a few rounds we were pros. I barked commands in fake German while Jacob pleaded for his life, pretending to cry. I grabbed him by the nape of his neck and threw him into the phone booth, paused for a moment, then slammed the door shut. The light came on, the fan whirred, and imaginary gas filled the booth. Jacob grabbed his neck and let his tongue hang out of his mouth, then put both palms on the glass—a cinematic flourish, but a good one—before slowly sliding down the door and crumpling to the floor. I goose-stepped back and forth in front of the booth, standing guard, laughing maniacally. You know—just like the Nazis did. I goose-stepped to the door and slid it open. Jacob fell out, collapsed on the cement floor of the basement.

He was dead.

Then he got up and it was my turn. Roles reversed, I begged Jacob not to put me in the gas chamber. His asthma made him a pretty lousy guard, but I was willing to play along.

“Eet eez your time for die now, Jew. Das eez goot!”

He threw me in the chamber, slammed the door shut and goose-stepped back and forth. I gasped for breath and clutched my throat. I tried to imagine what dying in a gas chamber would really be like. I wanted it to be realistic. I squirmed and convulsed. I tried to froth at the mouth but drooled all over my shirt instead. I was going all out, but I noticed that Jacob was no longer goose-stepping. He hadn’t crossed the window of the gas chamber for a while, either. I peered out the window and saw Jacob standing still, facing the stairs that led down to the basement. He was gesturing toward the phone booth, talking to someone. I opened the door a crack. The fan stopped whirring and the light shut off. As the fan went silent, I heard Jacob in mid-sentence.

“ . . . and when the fan turns on it releases the gas!” he said.

He was talking to his mom.

My mother picked me up shortly after, and that was the last time I ever hung out at Jacob’s house.

Fucking snitch.