Not A Good Soldier

I’ve met only one real genius in my life thus far. She was my high school drama teacher in Portland, Oregon. A post New York drama drill sergeant, Mama-Jay, as I’d like to call her, was not your average lesson. Our first class sophomore year was an exercise on communication. Us students, all thirty-six of us, were pushed into the florescent lighting of windowless Room 279 (a wonderful room for mid-rehearsal hookups, or so I’ve heard…). Broken into pairs, we were told to pick a song that we could hum with an appropriately unique melody. Jessica and I chose the star spangled banner, obviously.

“Get down on your hands and knees!” Mama-J screamed. Reluctantly we did. “Now I’m going to turn off the lights, and I want you all to crawl around and hum your song until you find your partner.” I bet Adam, “ten bucks this leads to a national scandal.” “Go!” Bam. The lights went out and the room slipped into pitch-dark anarchy. Thirty-six voices all fighting to push the loudest note in a tremendous hub of hum. Every chord and melody blended while we crawled aimlessly on the floor, guiding our bodies against one another in search for our song. There were some questionable hands grabbing in the dark, but I was too busy feeling lost and helpless in the pile of bodies to think of anything more than humming those stars and bars.

It wasn’t easy to leave that class for my fourth period IB writing seminar. Our syllabus, titled “How to Succeed in International Baccalaureate,” was void of a single inspiring sentence or thought. I guess those old ideas had become rather cavil. In the odd twist of educational irony, this chicanery was not always transparent. If anything it was taken with utmost seriousness. “You must do this or you’re going to fail!” That was the theme of life in my education.

“The IB rubric is not sympathetic,” railed Mr. Gordenstien. “You can slack off, but IB doesn’t care. You can be sick, and IB doesn’t care. You can be dead… IB doesn’t care.” Well what the fuck does IB care about? As we spent the afternoon sifting through the seven levels of the IB rubric, I began to realize that it was all the same shit with a slightly different smell. Instead of letters we would be assigned a number. “1” meant you obviously didn’t try. “2” meant you tried but you’re a fucking idiot. “3” meant you spent a lot of money just to scrape average, still not passing. “4” was a big congratulations, you passed but most schools still wont give you credit for it. “5” was a big “woo-hoo.” “6” and “7” were essentially deemed unattainable. “I’ve only had two students get a six, and I’d be shocked to get one out of this class.” At least we had moral support.

Our study of the “rational mind” was yet another headache of contradiction. Most of our classes were spent discussing philosophy and the roots of the educational structure. As a class we concluded that the rational mind would deem standardized education entirely irrational. “People are snow flakes,” professed Gordenstien, our awkward, Jewish poet. “Is there another Mr. Gordenstien out there? Is there another man as equal in personality as Mr. Gordenstien? I’m afraid there just isn’t.” While I shuttered at the very notion of a Gordenstien clone, I couldn’t help but sink deep into my chair and feel helplessly lost in the dense irrational.

The rational mind was saying, “fuck you.” At least mine did while walking into class for IB thesis presentations; hickies on my neck and cum in my hair. No room left on my transcript for disgrace, my teachers began stamping my forehead with labels. I was the slut, the rebel, or the contrary conformist. In the end, I was merely a nobody, lacking any vision or direction for my life. “What happened, Andy?” asked my advisor, the same woman who called a meeting with my mom and the principle to fight a “B” in my Sophomore English class. “He’s valedictorian material!” she protested then, whatever that was supposed to mean. Now I was just a blip of self-decay. The rebelling conformist slut. “Boyfriends are for the established! Sex is for the mature! Drugs are for the unhappy!” “No shit! Really?”

I guess my redemption came senior year when it wasn’t my water bottle filled with vodka second period, nor were any stories told on my wasted sexcapades in hot tubs – good old Amanda Little beating freshmen off with her feet. Nope, these stories were the sad tales of those who actually did give a shit. Ha! They were the all-star athletes mixed with the honor roll. They weren’t the valedictorians of the IB enclave, their lives too consumed with the art of defining themselves within the 1 through 7 rubric to be even slightly interesting. But everyone was just trying to “get it done.” It was almost over. “Andy! You can do this and you know it,” my freshman English teacher, three years after the fact. “This should be easy for you. You’re not some fuck-up…” Nope, I’m not. She must not have understood my own protest when I berated her my third week of high school for teaching us “canned curriculum.” And I still got an A!

No one seemed happy with the system. Some of my teachers had given up beyond their employment. My morbidly obese IB history teacher led his unit on America’s independence with a weeklong showing of Mel Gibson in “The Patriot.” We were then expected to write a heavily detailed five page formatted research paper with footnotes and textual references. What’s depressing is that the man really did know history - he could probably recite Lucretia Mott’s menstrual calendar to the date - but he didn’t give a shit about teaching, and he didn’t give a shit about my sluty, conformist ways. Our unit on slavery was a showing of “Amistad.” The last two months of class were a marathon of movies I’ve never seen having cut every class. The next year he was diagnosed with cancer and died within months. I’m convinced that high school killed him.

These were the people educating me. I wish I could fill the margins of my transcript with evaluations of every person who managed to fail me those four years. Maybe I could just write a cover letter? A plea to the rational mind, “These grades mean nothing! Science has proven otherwise! Everything we are taught or have discovered in our short human existence has contradicted these ideals!”

In drama we continued our lessons with an exercise on the placement of power. We were told to, in turns, take any piece of furniture and place it in a position of authority in the room. The first girl placed a chair on top of a desk in the center of our circle. Soon a second chair followed. Then a third. A fourth. The stack of chairs was growing to a precarious height. When it was my turn I placed a chair upside-down atop the rest, believing that if I could remove it from it’s assigned gravitational direction and place it higher then the others that it could be the all-defining force of unrestrained power. All right, that’s probably an elaboration of my own philosophical calculations. Either way, it was still a miscalculation. The chair wouldn’t rest and the stack began to slip. As the tower swayed from left to right the room erupted in screams as we all scattered from the toppling structure, miraculously avoiding a lawsuit. The non-conformist chair had no place at the top of the tower and it all came crashing down around me.

“We really fucked up,” Mama-J told me in private one night. We sat in the cold auditorium watching rehearsals for the spring musical. “My generation let this happen. We let the world erode around us. We sold out.” “Sold out? What did you sell out for?” “You see that’s the point. We sold out for safety and comfort. Every generation sells out at some point. You’ll see what I mean when you grow older, but at some point in life you just want stability and comfort. You couldn’t give half a shit about where you stood even if you tried. Fuck, the only reason I’m still here is because I’m fifty with a boyfriend who has a retarded son. I can’t leave that asshole!” “Is the sex good?” “It’s sex.” At the end of the show’s run I bought her a present and tied a little note to the box:

Now you have no reason to stay… love Andy

It was a vibrator, of course.

- - - -

Of all my educational traumas, nothing beats the sex box of fifth grade, my first real educational introduction to the not so innocuous. It was painted black with questions like “Sex?” “Love?” and “Penis?” sparkling with glitter glue. The side that said “Penis?” was of course turned to the wall. “We don’t want to confuse Principle Matthews.”

First note, ‘Penis’ is confusing.

The sex box remained enshrined at the front of the classroom so we could discretely insert anonymous inquiries to be answered at the end of the week – what would become our first, and very last, Sex Friday.

“Ah, of course. ‘What is pubic hair?’ Well class, once you start to hit puberty you’ll start to notice some changes. One of those changes is hair. You’ll start growing hair on your genitals.” “When is that?” “When you reach puberty.” “No, when does puberty happen.”

“Well it’s not the same for everyone. Some of you have probably already started puberty.” We all gazed around, scanning the room for possible suspects. “Anyway, that’s what pubic hair is.” “But why does it grow there?” “What do you mean?” “Why do we need hair down there?”

“Well. It’s… Think of it like a pillow. Pubic hair grows to cushion your genitals. They’re very sensitive, especially after puberty. So… think of it as nature’s pillow.”

Second note, pubic hair is pillow for ‘Penis.’

A half hour later, “Alright last question. ‘What is sex?’ Oh, well that’s easy. When a man and woman have sex, it’s an act of pleasure. They can love each other - though a lot of people these days don’t - and they have sex to pleasure one another.” “What pleasure?” “It’s a stimulation. You wouldn’t understand yet because you haven’t reached puberty.” Eyes locked on the non-puberty boy. “Not you, I mean in general, you have to finish puberty before you can feel that… stimulation. A man will insert his penis into the vagina and the penis will stimulate the vagina… It penetrates the vagina, causing pleasurable stimulation. Think of the penis like a cookie. A cookie tastes good to the mouth, a penis tastes good to the vagina.”

Third note, ‘Penis’ tastes good.

- - - -

Back in sophomore year, I was still crawling through the dark room singing those stars and bars. As our thirty-six voices droned on, Mama-J left the room to make a phone call. So there we were, all of us determined to find a solution to the task before us when in my ear I heard Jessica’s whisper, “Andy?” “Hey! Jessica?” “Cool, there’s like two other groups with this song.” “Oh, well you found me.” “Yeah… what now?” “Is that your hand?” a third voice, male, “Oh… sorry.” Jessica again, “Hey, let’s go this way.” “Ow! Shit!” “What?” “I hit my head on a desk.”

We finally found a corner to sit and talk. Mama-J never came back but no one dared to turn on the lights. At least one couple was going at something, but for the most part we all just tried to enjoy the peace and solitude that our school day usually didn’t provide. Having not been taught how to self-maintain once abandoned by our guiding instructors, all sorts of rowdy shenanigans replaced the task we’d begun. While this was not particularly unusual for my drama class, it was on this day that our teacher’s lesson actually began to resonate.

We’re all lost in the dark. It’s like someone turned out the lights and said, “Everyone! Yell as loud as you can so that somebody might hear you!” The sad part is that no matter how loud we hum our song, we still have no idea where we are or where we’re going. No one wants to admit this anarchy, at least not at school. Rather we’re all placed on a scale of 1 through 7 to determine just how well we can conform to an arbitrary system of mental ejaculation. We’re given a list of songs to sing while crawling through the dark. These are the songs that the educational elite will listen to.

American education continues to foster these failed ideals on knowledge. The institutions meant to propel us beyond these obviously broken systems are so caught up in money that they refuse to denounce the paperwork and statistics of the high school oxymoron. When are we going to wake up? The students who don’t fit the broken mold are some of the most independent idealists themselves. All my life I’ve been taught that to break the mold is the most important step to human individuality, or was this just a lie they tell us in school? Our society can’t self-proclaim a strong embrace of the arts while disqualifying the argument on the art of “how-to-learn.” It’s not rocket science. In fact it’s rational thinking, a term hijacked by the educational elite in their writings and studies. The rational mind is the new aristocracy as we enter a generation in desperate need of leadership and direction. We need yet another person to tell us what to do.

Well I’m not enlisting in the alphabet army, no matter how homoerotic my uniformed fantasies may be. This is war, folks. Those with the money are herding us like cattle, weeding us out of the dark and into their pockets in exchange for the “American Dream.”

So what happened to our schools? Is it the tradition itself of sitting in uncomfortable chairs within the awful color choice of muted green meets musky orange that we are so desperate to preserve? What values are we trying to achieve by herding our children through benchmarks and GPA’s? The lady on the corner of 56th and Lex makes a convincing argument, “They stop teaching prayer in school and now we’ve got autism.”
So many of my educators loved to rail on about the system. “They have us in a death grip,” my English teacher told me. “We have criteria that must be met, and the schools have a fixation on standardized tests.” Really? No shit! You don’t say so!?! Who’da’thunk that somebody somewhere was pushing benchmarks to guide our uninspired educators? Generations of sellouts have passed this deficit of integrity on to the youth of America so that idiots teach idiots and nobody learns a thing! I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a teacher getting fired for expanding on required projects. No teacher I know of has ever been dismissed for engaging and inspiring students through creative means (despite my better judgment, sexual means are not creative). Never has the temporary replacement of structure with freeform art been a mortal sin. We had two weeks to make party masks when reading Romeo & Juliet - graded of course - but no time to throw out these ever-looming deadlines.

Only sixty-nine percent of high school students manage to graduate. In the thirty-five largest U.S. cities, less than fifty percent of students starting their freshman year will see a high school diploma. How much longer can we blame students for the failures of those meant to guide us? It’s all about the degree. Those who pushed through while filling in dots with their number two pencil, content for whatever reason, suddenly have a world of opportunity before them (or so we are meant to believe). But what is the purpose of this world? Is it to make money? That’s the big winner?

What the fuck am I supposed to do with money? I guess spend it seems like the rational answer to that question. Give it to charity the more noble. But who am I in all this mess? I’m merely the man who takes a pile of nothing and hands it out across the world until it turns into something; a product so far beyond my own human capacities that I somehow think myself the messiah. The God. Whether this great pile of money represents selfishness or benevolence, it’s still the selfish result of a culture sold on selling out.

In the end, the great ideal is to be something because right now you’re absolutely nothing. An ad on the uptown D train says it all:

- “My train! Ahh, Phew. Made it. Can’t believe how crowded it is. Look at her… What a power suit… she must be on her way to a big meeting or an interview or something… I wish I had a reason to wear my power suit…” Adelphi University can take you there! -

I don’t think I remember “power suit” from sixth grade career day, but I guess it’s now an accredited degree. I bet that power suit is on her way to Adelphi University to beat off with her tenure and make a buck or two. Or maybe, grammatical errors included, the power suit is just a metaphor for the biggest problem of all. It’s something you buy. Your degree actually is your power suit! There’s an idea. How many years until it’s printed on Louis Vuitton paper?

What happened to dreams, man? Life may be about pushing yourself to the top, but shouldn’t that plateau be something personal? It should be something that makes your heart flutter whenever you think of it. It should take you to every place you every wanted to go, however few or many. These destinations should be filled with honest satisfaction, not material or accredited benchmarks. Life doesn’t sit and wait and say, “Here boy! This way… over here!”

To be honest, life is a cunt and she doesn’t give a shit if you got a perfect score on your SAT’s. She may choose to just fuck you over the very next day. So where are you left? Were you happy all those days you spent in your SAT prep class? Your PSAT prep class? How about your AP or IB exams? Have you proven yourself? What’s your grade? Your number? Feel enlightened yet?

Not a bit and I’m pissed. They always promised it would lead to bigger, greater things. They preached that when you finally turned the corner on high school that life would be in plain sight. What a sick misconception! I hope that youth today are dropping out not because they don’t want to learn but because they’re just not learning at all. They’re missing out on life and struggle in exchange for material bullshit. The room is still pitch-black, baby. Nobody’s ever going to turn the light on. So I say sing something good (preferably not the stars and bars) and hope that somebody somewhere is listening. And don’t shave your pillow, please… it’s sensitive down there.