Lost in the Meritocracy (v5) by Walter Kirn Read Free Book Online

in the firefly evenings after supper I pitched rocks into the trees just to hear them go ripping through the leaves. I sat on a stump with a Playboy from a trash bin, rehearsing the party jokes, relishing the nipples. There was always the library, my mother said, and she brought me there at every excuse, but the books were in poor condition, missing pages, and the best ones, like A Wrinkle in Time and the Hardy Boys series, seemed to be permanently checked out. Instead I ran off to the woods to break an arm or sped away on my bike to gash a shin. In August there was always a week in bed, a stretch of seclusion, Tylenol and root beer. There was always a murder on my AM radio, a shouting match in my parents’ bedroom, a grandparent dozing on our sofa. And then it was over. Time to buy new shoes. Time to start school again, to wake back up, with nothing to show for the summer but a fresh haircut and a bird skull I’d found in a puddle. But nothing learned.
    M ath had always been a cinch for me. My teachers said I had a head for numbers. But then, in fifth grade, math turned into something else. Letters were added. Symbols. Diagrams. “Problems” that had once had “answers” became “equations” with “solutions.” Mysteries emerged. The value of pi, we learned, could only be estimated, and we were informed that it was possible to count backward from zero, not just forward from one. I kept up with these puzzles, but I didn’t like them; they seemed to be pointing toward a realm of darkness, toward a less reliable reality.
    It didn’t help that Marine was changing, too. The town’s adults, including my mother and father, were throwing more parties than in years past, and the parties were running later into the nights. My brother and I could feel them roaring beneath us as we lay in our beds watching talk shows from Los Angeles whose naughty banter and eccentric guests—a willowy hippie who strummed a ukulele, a bearded fat man who performed bad card tricks, a Spanish bombshell in a sequined sheath who shimmied her hips and yodeled nonsense—seemed to echo the strange vibrations we’d been feeling for a while by then. The first shock came when Marine’s new Lutheran pastor showed up for services one Sunday morning driving a motorcycle with a chrome gas tank and a suntanned girlfriend on the back. Soon afterward, someone set fire to the bandstand and spray-painted peace signs on the general store. Then the elm trees started dying, whole majestic arching columns of them, the cores of their trunks chewed to sawdust by foreign beetles. This blight coincided with the news that the parents of three of my best friends, three separate couples, were filing for divorces, and that one of the wives planned to marry one of the husbands. But the most jolting development, to my mind, was the appearance of a bumper sticker on two of my mother’s best friends’ station wagons: BAN THE BRA! Was it a joke? The slogan seemed ominously juvenile. Our parents, I began to fear, were no longer in any condition to protect us.
    School was no refuge. The math units disturbed me, and Mr. Applebaum, our fifth-grade teacher, who was younger than the others, made me jumpy. His manner was boyish and exuberant, but there was a savagery to his vitality, especially on the subject of Vietnam. He supported the war. He loved it, actually, and those who didn’t love it disgusted him. He called them names. They were sissies, perverts, traitors. To counter the damage he said that they were doing to our national morale, he had each of us write a letter to a soldier. To fire us up, he described the distant GIs as noble giants beset by tricky peasants too cowardly to fight them man-to-man. Instead, the fiends used booby traps that fired poisoned shrapnel through our guys’ feet or snared their boots in coiled vines and snatched their bodies up into the tree-tops. The letter I wrote after hearing about these horrors was short and lazy. I assumed that the