My reputation as a brooding intellectual blossomed in junior high then flowered in high school.
It was a period in my life when I hauled around thick books on serious topics by profound authors for ostentatious displays. I was hoping my ninth grade colleagues would take me for a high school student, perhaps even college material. I’m surprised I didn’t start smoking a Meerschaum pipe.
These pretentious gestures might have succeeded if I were not short, scrawny and a walking pimple farm.
By tenth grade, while others were reading books about duckies on the farm and the Bobbsy Twins, I was marinating in Kerouac and e.e. cummings.
Having already conquered ‘Lord of the Flies’ and ‘The Catcher in the Rye,’ my appetite for advanced literary material was primed. I wanted books that challenged, books that impressed other people, books that were big, thick, heavy and impossible for me to comprehend.
Having no real identity and not many friends, I was trying to invent a plausible character for myself. I imagined a young scholar (me) who appeared to the world, or at least other kids in study hall, as an intriguing loner immersed in troubling thoughts, inner turmoil, a budding skeptic.
Books were props in the one-dimensional play I starred in. (I was also director, critic, wardrobe assistant and script writer.) Carrying around a battered copy of ‘Naked Lunch’ allowed me to move freely amid disparate groups, secure knowing I was secretly admired by cheerleaders, envied by jocks, laughed at by friends who knew a phony when they saw one (saw me).
One day I picked out a fat number called ‘Exodus’ by Leon Uris. It had the bulk and pretension factors I required, and for a semester we went steady. It was set in some place called Israel, which I probably thought was between Iowa and Indiana. Trouble brewing.
Ignorance showing.
I “read” Exodus slowly. Exceedingly slowly. Three words a day slowly. My goal, remember, was for fellow students to behold my towering intellect. When “reading” it in study hall I paused every few pages to scrawl messages in the book’s margins, giving the impression I’d encountered a arresting comment, brilliant insight or a dangling participle.
‘Exodus’ is a complex historical novel detailing middle eastern strife going back to oh, Biblical times give or take a geological age or two, culminating around the Second World War. More trouble, more ignorance.
But I couldn’t quit. Instead I dug deeper, read harder, furrowed my brows thicker, turned the pages faster and stayed the course, from about Page 20 where I’d been stalled for a week, to page 16,000. I was hoping to spot some metaphors, allegories, symbolism, satire, poetic license and a few italicized phrases in French. All culminating in man’s inhumanity to man.
Bah. What I really needed was an ‘Exodus’ synopsis, like maybe a 24-page coloring book version.
I plodded on, lost in a vexing morass of confused plot, a barrage of characters whose names all started with “Abba Ben-something” and a few thousand years of background, probably mingled with betrayal and mystery but I wouldn’t have understood even if Mr. Uris had sent me a plot diagram.
The Problem: I was in way over my head, no more able to understand ‘Exodus’ than if reading it upside down and backwards.
The Other Problem: Weeks ago I’d committed to giving my oral book report on ‘Exodus,’ chosen entirely because of its impressive girth. The fat turquoise paperback pig weighed as much as Gus, my Dachshund.
I was sunk. My rising star of pseudo intellectualism was at stake, it was far too late to change course and I would soon be exposed as a cheap weasely fraud. Looking back, I understand teenage suicide.
The oral report itself is a blur of embarrassment, 15-minutes of standup fraud, my counterfeit image exposed as nothing but lies and deception. I was Elizabeth Warren before there was an Elizabeth Warren.
I was finished as a scholar; if I had actually smoked a pipe I would have thrown it away. But then a funny, unanticipated thing happened and my secret remained buried.
The thundering defeat and humiliation I clearly deserved went unnoticed by my audience of inattentive 14-year olds. They didn’t care. No one was listening to me stammering out a bunch of boring stuff about a dumb book.
My rank hypocrisy? Unnoticed. The shame was mine alone. They’d paid no more attention to my dishonest book report than I’d paid when Melanie Froelich gave hers on ‘Pride and Prejudice.’ Or maybe it was about Nancy Drew.
Of course I learned nothing from the near disaster and kept up my lying, deceitful ways. Next on the literary tour of shame: ‘Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,’ which I lugged everywhere. ‘Dear & Glorious Physician,’ by Taylor Caldwell, was my next victim.
Sometimes I wonder if teachers and students today at Parma Senior High still marvel at the precocious lad who, long ago, read ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ when he was just 15.
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