I studied. I stopped blowing off homework. I paid attention.
I retired from my esteemed position as class cutup (a position I had held without dispute since the first grade), breaking my schoolmates’ hearts. With my hijinks and tomfoolery no longer around to regale them, they had to look elsewhere for their amusement, and since the classes were so small and the pool of replacements so shallow (Doug Abernathy was a year behind us), they had to settle for whatever anemic daydreams their sterile imaginations could produce, or the inescapable tedium learning so often is.
To make matters worse, I went so far as to try to become one of the achievers, the brainiacs, the suck-ups. I, previously so rascally, so mischievous, so devil-may-care, unexpectedly morphed into another of those insufferable, ultra-competitive go-getters that drive everybody else up the wall.
I don’t think I can fully relate here how much of a betrayal this was to my contemporaries: the ranks of middling irrelevancies, who, though at the height of their oh-so-thrilling teenage years, were already dismayed over how mundane and empty their lives were; who only wanted something or someone to add a dash of zest to all of the present and coming blah before death; who saw me, yes, as one of them, but special in that I could put up a fight against the suck-ups and our nemesis teachers. For so long they had been able to rely on me to be a provider of that zest—the loveable rapscallion with a talent for disruptive hilarity—that when I abruptly and irreversibly changed into what they despised the most, it proved a bit much for them to take.
Some turned on me right away and deemed me a weenie. Others, in denial, held out hope that the old funny Frankie Horvath they knew and loved would return after these ridiculous experiments with exertion and ambition, and once again comically mess up Spanish verb conjugations on the blackboard, glue a teacher’s coffee mug to her desk, and/or make funny fart noises and blame them on the girl with the bloated face that nobody liked, Delia Nordsbury.
But that Frankie Horvath was gone forever.
2
The new and improved me, reborn in the fire of my father’s challenge, had decided my jokester/prankster side, such a relief and joy to my coevals, if resurrected—even temporarily—might destroy my chance at a greatness still in its wet, stinking infancy. But beyond my transformation into model student, I wanted more: to do more and be more than most people. After a few weeks of the new experience of completing minimum requirements, I learned it wasn’t enough to merely pay attention, finish my homework, try hard on tests, and smile toothily at teachers. I wanted to get ahead, not just reach what was expected of me. I wanted to be gifted, a prodigy, a genius, and I wanted everybody else beneath me.
As Gore Vidal once stole from some French writer nobody’s ever heard of (and whose name I cannot pronounce):
It is not enough that I succeed. Others must fail.
I went beyond the books and worked ahead, managing to get a hold of lessons from months down the road and familiarizing myself with them in advance. I got into word power exercises, the idea for this coming from a book recommended by a clerk named Chip in the only bookstore in Kokomo County who guaranteed it would help me dazzle the world with such big, important words that everybody would have to go scurrying for a dictionary just to be able to understand me.
The following summer, I saved up the money I earned mowing Reverend Phipps’s lawn with the Character Developer, not for a dirt bike or a long-coveted Sega Genesis video game system, but for an infomercial cassette set and workbook that promised to turn me into a human calculator, capable of computing impossible sums in the twinkling of an eye. I liked the idea of being able to compute impossible sums in the twinkling of an eye and fantasized wildly about situations arising in the Horvath household where the old man would be faced with, say, a life-or-death multiplication problem and I would reel off the answer so eye-twinklingly quick he would tumble right out of a chair and onto the floor.
“Why, Frankie,” he would sputter in disbelief, grabbing at an end table to hoist himself up, “you did it!”
“That is affirmative, Father,” I would reply, folding my arms, not stooping to help him. “My unparalleled computative proficiency integrated with my insuperable analytical capability has denaturized this jeopardous mathematical imbroglio into an abecedarian bagatelle.”
And then the bastard would go scurrying for a dictionary.
That Christmas, I bought myself the next product offered by the miracle workers behind the human calculator creation, one that promised the same shrewd soul who had invested with them before that if he or she would but send them whatever was left of their summer work savings (as well as a healthy chunk of their winter snow-shoveling earnings), they would in turn bestow upon them another tape set that would teach them to never forget anything ever again.
I, feeling at least as shrewd as before, sent in the funds and they, true to their word, sent me the tapes that promised to teach me to never forget anything ever again.
And I listened to those tapes. And I learned how to not forget stuff.
I composed intricate, sophisticated study guides in thick spooly notebooks; I made flash cards in a variety of bright, memory-enhancing colors. I had my mother use these flash cards to test me frequently. I, unlike other students who made study guides, actually used mine.
When exam time came, my essays were always two to four pages beyond the allotted space given and written in tiny, fastidious handwriting. (I had read somewhere that prodigies and geniuses wrote in such a way.) On these same exams, I always attempted the extra credit question, and in case there was a chance that finishing before anyone else would influence the teacher to look more favorably at my work, I was almost always the first one done.
Yes, throughout my years at Red Skelton Middle School† and Strother Martin High,‡ I was, as many of the IndyCar-loving citizens of Kokomo County would say, “revvin’ in the red.”
I joined the debate team. I ran for Student Council. I signed up for drug awareness programs and wore drug awareness t-shirts. I entered the spelling bee every year until I was too old to compete. When the class drama came around, I auditioned for every part. In band, I played the clarinet and I practiced two hours every day. For sports, I did the holy trinity: football, basketball, baseball. I even made myself available to fill in for track if needed.
What about the soul and the spirit? The content of my character? I had that covered, too. In addition to academic and athletic magnificence, I wanted to be a notable man of faith, the consummate moral example. Like St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas—hell, even Reverend Phipps.
So you’d better believe I was in the front row at church every Sunday morning, doing everything Reverend Phipps told the congregation to do. When he told everyone to sing songs for Jesus and jump on the sanctuary trampoline, there I was, singing songs for Jesus and jumping on the trampoline. When Reverend Phipps reminded everyone to pray to God on their own, I made sure to pray to God on my own—and I even remembered to include others in this prayer time when Reverend Phipps told us to include others and started a devotional meeting before the first bell. When nobody showed up to pray with me, I offered free donuts. When a couple of students showed up, I prayed with them and ate donuts.
I began caring about the Ten Commandments—and not just the movie either.
I even spoke in tongues between classes.
A sample tongues-sentence from me back then: “Gorzy-morzy rolio-chee-andelio gorzy-morzy-worzy.”
Like any other Christian giving tongues a go, I had no idea what the hell I was saying, but I thought God knew and wanted me to do it a lot. So I did it a lot.
“Gorzy-morzy-worzy-gorzy-morzy!” I said in the hallways, convinced that God was happy with me for talking like this so often and that He would, when an opportunity presented itself, tip the scales in my favor.
What a shame He never did.
Remember the old saw, “God helps those wh
o help themselves”?
Thieves caught mid-burglary would disagree. Fat children whose hands are slapped at the dinner table for digging into the mashed potatoes too early would disagree. I would disagree.
3
Like I said, I studied. That didn’t work. I still got the same underwhelming grades as before. Those much ballyhooed study guides of mine ended up being a complete waste of time. Somehow—and I’m still not sure how I managed it—the guides focused too heavily on the wrong details while glossing over what was important, and I tended to miss the proverbial forest for the trees.
Also, incredibly, I forgot stuff.
It was uncanny, astonishing, miraculous. Every single test this happened, I swear. It nearly drove me to madness a time or two, but I kept making study guides all the same. My only explanation for continuing to do something that seemed to hinder far more than help is that someday I expected my luck to even out and one of my study guides to finally aid me in nailing every single question on a test (or on many tests, if luck and I were to get square). And although that never happened, if you want my honest opinion, I still recommend study guides. They just didn’t do it for me.
My flash cards weren’t anything to write home about either.
Moving on to my test essays, they were never marked up for the amount of work put into them. There was no such thing as getting an “A” for effort at Strother Martin. This school, despite its inability to foster excellence from the majority of its students, nevertheless remained one of the last bulwarks against contemporary educational standards, meaning they only gave exemplary grades for exemplary results.
Hence, my essays, which were many times long on composition but generally found wanting in clarity, were panned as “muddled” and “rambling.” Mr. Roark, my eleventh grade American History teacher, once wrote the following in the margin of what I had thought to be an insightful critique of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (but had also gone on well past the six-inch space provided and had required four pieces of paper from my notebook):
“Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...”
I did get the extra credit question right most of the time, though, as most students who do them know, they never substantially raise your grade. This is because doing extra work has and always will be for chumps.
What about word power? The human calculator? Never forgetting anything ever again? What about all the time, energy, and precious capital spent in pursuit of those skills?
To answer these questions I will leave you to find two time-honored quotes: one attributed to P.T. Barnum (but was actually said by a rival), and the other a classic English proverb.
C’mon, you know what they are. One is about the birth frequency of suckers. The other tells of how easily and quickly these same suckers and their wealth can be divorced; and as I will say until Judgment Day or Oblivion: Kids are idiots and suckers and fools, and I, tragically, was no different.
4
In place of academic achievement in the traditional sense, I was forced to look elsewhere for some measure of success, eventually setting my sights on the progenitor to all modern methods of student evaluation in twenty-first century schooling: the Perfect Attendance Award.
Perfect Attendance Awards are typically given to students of unusually sturdy constitutions either too naive to realize school need not be attended every day or too stupid to figure out how to play hooky.
Up until I realized my avenues for distinction were not as numerous as I’d thought, I considered the Perfect Attendance Award a joke, similar to being commended for making it through the year without eating earwax or hoarding used sanitary napkins. However, the permanence of my struggles forced me to rethink this stance, to where I was not only able to ignore how absurd it was to receive accolades for doing nothing more than appearing at the same location five days a week for nine months, but to where I could also delude myself into believing such an award was something I had to have at any cost.
Thus, with the type of anticipation normally reserved for the likes of Christmas Eve, I excitedly started going to bed every school night, with the following morning finding me shot out of the sack like a sprinter off the blocks, and dressing and eating my breakfast with a deranged intensity most would not associate with such mundane activities like putting on pants and eating Fruit Loops.
Every morning I was the first kid at the bus stop, the first kid in the classroom, the first kid in a desk. I longed for the call of the first bell like a jihadi longs for the muezzin’s call to prayer, and when the teacher took roll I barked, “PRESENT!” with the passion of a rabid SS officer jawohl-ing to every order from his Hauptsturmführer.
Every day successfully attended was marked with a big smiley face on the Proust the Bear calendar above the desk in my room. If I reached a perfect month, I would allow myself a package of strawberry licorice. If I reached a perfect semester, I would get a whole supreme pizza. And if I made it the entire year: gallon of Neapolitan ice cream on one knee, bottle of chocolate syrup on the other, huge spoon.
If you would have been around for all of this, you wouldn’t have been able to help but admire my resolve to show up to school every day come rain or shine. You might have even given me a compliment on my clever rewards system. You would not have admired, though, my ability to see this plan through. Somehow, despite my doggedness and desire, despite all the smiley faces and payoffs to come, I always ended up missing at least a day’s worth of classes every year.
This was in part because I don’t have an unusually sturdy constitution. For whatever reason, it seems, every now and then I get sick.
Freshman year my appendix burst. I had to have surgery. I missed two weeks.
I sought a reprieve upon my return, showed the teachers my scar, and assured them I really wanted to be there and that my exploded organ had been an extraordinary circumstance no kid could have attended class through. But alas, my pleas fell on deaf ears, as Ms. Munt, who was known around Strother Martin as a perfect attendance hardliner (and for her insidious ways of swaying the vote to the negative on borderline cases), said she didn’t care about the reason I had missed class.
“You weren’t here every day,” Ms. Munt said. “Therefore, Mr. Horvath, you are disqualified by the very first rule of perfect attendance: The student must be in class every school day.”
(Note: The very first rule is also the only rule.)
The following year, my mother, the old man, and I flew out to Idaho for the holidays to see my Aunt Rosie and the bottled water salesman she’d married (still Uncle Chuck). We were to fly home the night before school started, but a vicious snowstorm blew in from out of nowhere and prevented the plane from departing; so instead of being in my desk at the sound of the first bell of the spring semester, ready to take on the scholastic world anew, I was in a folding chair at gate 1A in the Sioux Falls Regional Airport, shaking my fists at a rotted portion of the ceiling and cursing the day I was born.
When I did return the following day, I begged for mercy again, complained about the injustice of snow in wintertime, the cowardice of airlines, and how it was all out of my hands, but Ms. Munt was unbending.
“You didn’t have to go to Idaho in the first place, Mr. Hor-vath,” she said. “I guess you just didn’t want that Perfect Attendance Award badly enough.”
And my junior year of high school, what would turn out to be the last and best chance I would ever have for the Perfect Attendance Award, the diabolical Billy Slider tricked me into thinking classes would be canceled on Arbor Day.
Arbor Day, for those who don’t know, is a holiday for trees. It falls on the last Friday in April.
Up until then, I had run the gauntlet. Not a single runny nose, vomit fit, or failed kidney the entire year. I had stayed in Little Hat for every holiday and had made it to class, on time, each and every day.
This was it. The beginning of everything. Perfect attendance, which had evaded me for s
o long, would not escape this time. This time, the son of a bitch was in the bag. So in the bag—and specifically, my bag—that on the Tuesday before Arbor Day, I was strutting down the hall between classes whistling a cheerful tune.
Soon my study guides and flash cards would come through for me, I would stop second-guessing everything, my grades would spike, and my crackly popcorn voice would mature and deepen with BOOM. I would be the Petruchio in the next school play. No more Gremios for me. Not ever again.
All I had to do was get through the next week without missing a day, a foregone conclusion, since there were no trips to exotic Idaho on the horizon, while the chances of another rupture of a vestigial structure were miniscule.
Yep, there could be no doubting it: I was in the home stretch. I was cruising. And so I was whistling a cheerful tune as I strolled down the hall, cruised, until—
Bump! went Billy Slider’s shoulder into mine. Bumped! went my shoulder into his.
“Hey, weenie! Did you hear?” Billy Slider said.
“No,” I said.
“They just announced it. No school on Arbor Day.”
“No way!” I said.
“Way,” Billy Slider said.
This was a lie from the pit of Hell. There would be school on Arbor Day. Billy Slider was lying.
To make sure it stuck, Billy Slider had a bunch of other students and none other than Mr. Roark himself in on the conspiracy (the students, because they still hadn’t forgiven me for no longer making funny fart noises and blaming them on Delia Nordsbury, and Mr. Roark, I suspect, for pissing him off with my Tolstoyan-length test essays), so when I asked them about it—you know, for confirmation—they told me with straight faces that, yes, there would be no school on Arbor Day.
This would directly contradict what Ms. Munt would say at the end of class Thursday; that being, that she would see all of us tomorrow.
“Tomorrow” being Friday, Arbor Day.
Catastrophically for me, at the time this was said, I happened to be going over a study guide I hoped would make me invulnerable on the upcoming test on the Eisenhower presidency. As it would turn out, my reward for this extra studying would be a C plus. Most of what was in my study guide ended up being worthless (such as Ike’s enthusiasm for golf and his favorite dessert being prune whip), and only served to bog me down with unnecessary information (also, incredibly, I forgot stuff). And since Ms. Munt did not exactly have my undivided attention, I only half-heard what she said, which is roughly the same as saying I didn’t hear anything at all (although I would remember her words with regret and fury later), so when Arbor Day finally arrived in all its tree-loving glory the following morning, I happily slept in and did not go to school.
The Antichrist of Kokomo County Page 10
