Free Lost in the Meritocracy (v5) by Walter Kirn Page B

familiar.
    Jason continued trying to excite us. He divided a string of numbers that ran all the way to the right side of a notebook page by another monstrous sum which started with ten or twelve zeros behind a decimal point behind a minus sign. The printer was already printing out the answer while most of us were still mocking the equation, and it was at this instant that I became something I couldn’t name till later: a student of the liberal arts, devoted to concepts and ideas which didn’t depend on disembodied logic, on greater-than signs and parentheses and ampersands. This decision guided my studies from then on. The hard sciences were just too hard for me.
    “Hey Jason,” said one of my buddies to the whiz kid over hamburger salad at lunch one day. “Ever have a girlfriend?”
    “What do you think?”
    “You’re twelve . Get with it.”
    “Eleven and a half.”
    “Ever want a girlfriend?”
    “What do you think?”
    “Processing. Thinking. Tabulating. Printing.” This was me, satirizing Jason’s thinking in a cartoonish, transistorized monotone. “Conclusion: Negative. Categorically.” Then I switched over to my natural voice. “Jason, your new name is Neuter Nine.” Then back to a female version of the main voice. “Testicular excision now commencing. Working. Working. Surgery complete.”
    Jason went on eating his hot lunch. He hadn’t flinched. I hadn’t made him cry. Until then, I’d merely considered him ridiculous. Now I feared him. I rose and took my tray to a table across the room. I had a book with me. I pretended to read it. The others could have their weird symbols. I’d take words.
    F or me, the remainder of high school was a drinking party held in a cabin beside a lake, followed by three or four months of casual reading in world almanacs. I had some idea that a head all full of facts might smooth my transition into college now that my SAT results were in and the brochures were pouring into my mailbox. When Macalester said I could skip my senior year, I started saying goodbye to people. The rubber-gloved lunch ladies. Mr. Ka. The janitors. It was all over school that I wasn’t coming back.
    My last, most uncomfortable goodbye was to Mr. C, the English teacher whose wife’s first pregnancy had forced him to quit the grad-school program that he hoped would turn him into a novelist. I’d started ducking him way back in the winter, declining an invitation to an Eagles show and not responding either way to his assertion that it would be a gas to eat a dozen peyote buttons and go to a late show of Saturday Night Fever . When he tried to reestablish contact by biking over to our farm one weekend and coaxing me into getting high while I brushed and groomed the horses, I told him I’d only take one hit because I was feeling guilty as a Mormon.
    Now it was time to pay him a final call. I drove to his modular house one Sunday evening, walked up the gravel path past his kids’ yard toys—plastic tricycles, deflated basketballs—and knocked on his hollow-feeling vinyl door. His wife let me in. Around her and behind her were three or four fussy infants and toddlers. In the back of the room was her husband in his recliner wearing sunglasses, reading a book of poetry.
    “Walt, the new Dire Straits came. Come on in. You’ll want to hear two of the tracks on headphones first.”
    “I can’t really stay.”
    “Miller High Life, can or bottle?”
    “Can,” I said. A beer can is opaque. You don’t have to drink it to the bottom.
    “I heard you just crushed those college boards.”
    “I guess I have a knack for multiple choice.”
    He held out the headphones with their ear cups spread. I smelled wet diapers and wanted to get away.
    “Macalester took you. I heard that, too,” he said.
    “I’m thinking I might only spend a year there. I’d like to go somewhere out East if I can swing it.” Then I decided to ask the question that was my real reason for dropping over. Mr. C. was the only