Moshe Aryeh Friedman and the Magic Bedsheet - part 2

It is impossible for a child of ten years of age to be committed to Creedmoor. However, the Friedman parents and his many frustrated teachers, babysitters, and counselors needed a solution for little Moshe Aryeh, and fast.

So when Reb Velvel suggested Creedmoor, Moshe Aryeh's mother was only too happy to listen, and indeed she called the august institution to inquire as to whether there was a berth for her addled spawn.

While the answer was of course negative, it so happened that the medical director of Creedmoor at the time was Dr Michael Weinberg, an eminently overqualified heir to a building fortune, and himself a frum Yid of Hungarian origin with a very warm feeling toward Chassidus. So, Dr Weinberg agreed to accept Moshe Aryeh Friedman into a medical study aimed at assisting children with antisocial behavior patterns to somehow integrate into society.

This meant that every Monday, Wednesday and Thursday after school, Moshe Aryeh Friedman would be taken to a padded cell in Creedmoor for a few hours, where Dr Weinberg and his team tried to figure out what could be done to turn Moshe into "half a mensch, or eppes nisht azoy a vilder ferd," as one of his enervated teachers put it so eloquently.

Of course, when dealing with one as addled as Moshe Aryeh Friedman, success is not a given. And the treatments were given no chance of success, so that in essence Creedmoor was simply an after school day care center for "Freaky Freedy," a nickname that even the staff used for their unwanted charge.

And Freeky lived up to his name. He especially enjoyed drawing Zionist flags on the padding of his cell, and then tearing up the padding while shouting "Death to Zionism! Zionism and Judaism are direct opposites! Down with Zionist murderers!" Then, there were his myriad scams which the undersized terror carried out among the underpaid and under-documented maintenance staff.

For instance, the simplest scam was the cigarette scam. Moshe Aryeh Friedman was only 11 years old when he began this game, but credulous Mexican and Honduran janitorial assistants lined up to pay him a mere 50 cents for a pack of cigarettes "straight fin der Indianer reservation in Vilyemsburgh!" Since Moshe had driven his long suffering father to chain smoking long ago, he had no trouble obtaining Marlboro packages, in which he placed one piece of paper wrapped around chopped up rubberbands. He then resealed the packages with scotch tape and distributed them to his dupes, with instructions to "plent der cigarette in der erd end you grow a cigarette tree in tzvye months!" Given the low level of sophistication among his customers, they eagerly believed him, and when the trees did not grow in two months, he simply sold each dupe a half bottle of hydrogen peroxide for another fifty cents and told them to water their plants with "heiliger vasser fin der Rebbe."

And this was trumped only by his first welfare scam, successfully completed before he reached his 12th birthday..(part 3 coming after Shabbos).