Going for Broke

God knows I have, in my time, said some things that an objective observer would classify as vain, arrogant, perhaps a touch egotistical. However, what I am about to write may genuinely be the most outrageously vain, arrogant, egotistical, megalomaniacal thing I’ve ever put to print.

Nevertheless…onward.

It was pretty obvious to me shortly after I started school that I was not like everyone else. Sometime over the summer between kindergarten and first grade, I’d been sent to the home of a lady I knew from church, who asked me some questions and let me play with some red and white blocks, and I thought nothing of it. However, after about a week of school, I started spending one day a week in a different building doing something very different from the rest of the week at school. About a month after that, I would go to school, and about an hour into the day, I would be taken to a different class altogether with some older kids and spend the rest of the day with them, every day. And this continued for the rest of the school year.

I didn’t realize until well over a decade later that the thing with the blocks was something called the “Wisk.” And I didn’t realize for another decade that it wasn’t “Wisk” at all, but “WISC-R.” And I knew the scores, but I had no concept of what they stood for until a couple months ago in the pub, when a new acquaintance of mine who knows a thing or two about early childhood development almost spit her beer out and then explained that those numbers basically pegged the needle at the top of the scale.

I knew I was special, but I really had no idea. Thirty years on, it all looks amazing – I was spending my first grade in a third-grade class, reading on a junior-high grade level, and staying in front of the class despite missing 20% of the week to go to “gifted” class. And to cap it all off, I was a head taller than literally everybody else in first grade and most everyone in third.

Now you would expect a kid like this to be full of himself beyond all comprehension. And if I knew then what I know now, I probably would have responded to the situation much differently. Taunts about “nerd” and “space freak” and the like would have probably been answered with something to the effect of “Listen here, trilobite, I’m Mankind 2.0, I’m Humanity Fucking Advanced, so why don’t you and the rest of the Neanderthals SUCK IT?” However, I am pretty sure that saying “fucking” in a first-grade class, in Alabama, in 1978, would be a one-way ticket to happy hour in the principal’s office complete with free all-you-can-drink Palmolive margaritas.

But if there’s one thing I didn’t know then, it’s what I know now. What I did know is that I had enough humility drilled into me for three or four Buddhist mystics, and the refrain “think not more highly of yourself than you ought” echoed off the back of my skull. Problem is, I didn’t know what “ought” meant. All I knew is that I was radically different from everyone else, and they all thought I was a complete and utter freak, and I took it to heart.

Meanwhile, the teachers did what they could for me, but I regularly came home with a 100% on a test, the margins covered with doodles from imaginary gameshows, and every six weeks a report card full of A’s (save for the B in Handwriting) with a “Needs Improvement” checkmark on the report card for “Uses Time Wisely.” The problem wasn’t so much that I wasn’t being challenged – it’s that a public school in the deep South in the late 1970s simply was not capable of challenging me short of promoting me clear out of elementary school. Based on the pace I was on, I probably would have hit a wall starting seventh grade at age 9, largely thanks to things like puberty and phys-ed class. Beyond that, who knows – I can’t imagine they would have let me graduate from high school before I could drive, and I’m not sure how well I could have managed to get along with kids that much older than me when my own peers and I didn’t really hit it off at all.

Basically, what it boils down to is that I was an ugly duckling – if the duckling had green skin and was covered with orange rocks. The problem is that the different tracks of my development were running at very different speeds, and there was no way to keep everything in sync. But their ultimate solution was that one year later, when all the rest of my peers were starting second grade…I did too. And that was pretty much it – I was guaranteed to be a freak for the rest of my school career, until I hit high school. To this day, I don’t know why they put me back. I had a separate math book from everyone else, and would until at least fifth grade, but other than that, it was just sit idly and be good, so there I was – Jugtown Elementary’s very own miserable Midwich Cuckoo.

Ultimately, I think that’s why being back down South feels so weird – my close relatives are all right, my double second cousin is smarter than ME, and I usually have my wife to help pull me through – but few if any of my old high school mates are still around, and none I’m in touch with. As a result, going back means willfully plunging back into being the other – that weird mutant who just plain doesn’t belong there.

One more reason why it’s good to be back in the United States.