Walter Kirn - Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever  

The Unbinding
Mission to America
Up in the Air
Thumbsucker
She Needed Me
My Hard Bargain

O N THE BUS RIDE DOWN TO ST. PAUL TO TAKE THE TEST that will help determine who will get ahead in life, who will stay put, and who will fall behind, a few of my closest buddies seal their fates by opening pint bottles of cherry schnapps the moment we leave the high-school parking lot. My pals hide the liquor under their varsity jackets and monitor the drivers overhead mirror for opportune moments to duck their heads and swig. A girl sees what theyre up to, mutters Morons, and goes back to shading in the tiny ovals in her Scholastic Aptitude Test review book. She dated one of the guys awhile back and seemed amused by his clowning for a time, but lately shes grown serious, ambitious; Ive heard shes decided to practice law someday and prosecute companies that pollute the air. When she notices one of the bottles coming my way, she shoots me a look of horror.

No thanks, I say.

My friends seem wounded by thisarent we teammates? We play football and baseball together. We hang out. In our high-school class there are only fifteen boys, and every summer before the bugs get bad a bunch of us pitch tents beside the river and cannonball from the cliffs into the current, sometimes splashing down in twos and threes. In the winters some of us work at the same ski hill, selling lift tickets and running chair-lifts, and during haying season we form crews to help out the guys who live on farms. We talk as though well be together forever, but Ive always known better: someday well be ranked. Well be screened and scored and separated. Ive known this, it seems, since my first few years in grade school, not in this town, Taylors Falls, but in Marine, a few miles down the valley, when I raised my hand slightly faster than the other kidsand waved it around to make sure the teachers saw me.

A friend pushes the schnapps on me again just as Im starting to panic about time. The test begins in an hour and a half but were still twenty minutes from the interstate, stuck behind a lumbering Case tractor in the land of grain silos and barns where my family lives on a small farm that we cultivate, Amish style, with a team of horses, and where I spend my after-school hours splitting firewood, setting fence posts, filling stock tanks, and collecting eggs. Its been my home for several years now, but its also a stage set, a fantasy, and one that Ive never found convincing. My father isnt a farmer, hes a patent lawyer, and our familys excursion into vintage agriculture (like our conversion to Mormonism, which preceded it) is just one more phase in his campaign against convention and conformity that began twelve years ago, when he joined the 3M Corporation in St. Paul and sacrificed, as he saw it, his sacred freedom to the dictates of the herd. Hes been rebelling ever since, pursuing a rugged individualism that has involved, at different times, bow hunting, mountain climbing, weight lifting, and now, in his greatest caprice to date, nineteenth-century subsistence living. But those days are almost over, at least for me. I gaze out the bus window at the countryside and wonder what could have drawn my father here other than an instinct for self-punishment. Junk cars up on cinder blocks in scrubby fields, mangled deer on the shoulders of dirt roads, lonely old folks sitting on sagging porches breathing from portable tanks of oxygen. I see myself living in New York someday, in an art-filled apartment with views of vaulting bridges, not mired in this place of wistful rot.

I already said I dont want any, I say. The guy now holding out the schnapps is named Rolf, a hulking colossus of pale Norwegian gristle who plays center on the Bluejays, our losing football team.

Afraid youll catch my germs? he cracks.

Everybody who drinks from the school water fountain already has your germs.

Right. Like youre some perfect Mr. Clean.

At least I shake off before I zip back up.

Rolf flips me the bird. Theres black crud under his fingernails. He works part-time for his uncles excavation company, and once he learns to run a diesel backhoe hell have job security for life. Instead of wasting my energy sparring with him, I should be concentrating on the review book like the red-haired boy across from me, the only other A student on the bus. Hes a hard kid to get to know, a social ghost, forbidden by his familys harsh religion from singing holiday-related songs and forced by its stringent dietary teachings to live on sack lunches of carrots and slivered almonds. Sometimes I fear hes brighter than I am; hes certainly more studious. He works with his head down, calm and dogged, while I rely on gimmicky maneuvers such as rephrasing teachers simple questions (How does racial prejudice contribute to inner-city hopelessness?) into complicated riddles (Is our conception of inner-city hopelessness perhaps in itself a form of prejudice?) designed to provoke class discussions that I can dominate with my amped-up flash-card-based vocabulary. Do my ploys show intelligence or desperation? Both, I suspect. In me the traits seem fused.

I watch the bottle being passed and I make my final plea.

Stop it, you guys. Today is a big deal for us.

But they know this alreadythey just dont like the fact. The SAT isnt a reckoning they asked for. The exam was devised by strangers on the East Coast, a part of the country we associate with stockbrokers, mobsters, and fashion models. The sample questions in the review books (ART : CUBISM :: (A) scenery : play; (B) setting : ring; (C) mustache : face; (D) poem : epic) resemble none weve ever faced. Taylors Falls Public High School is a dump. Grades K through twelve are stuffed into one squat building surrounded by crabgrass ball fields full of gopher holes, and some of our teachers do little but coach sports. They wear their whistles and ball caps at their desks, paging through magazines while we, their students, pass the class hours scribbling in photocopied workbooks whose fuzzy type and off-key phrasings (Among the proud peoples of the Orient ) suggest that they havent been updated for decades.

The St. Paul skyline stands up in the windshield as one of my classmates flings back a shot of schnapps and licks his sticky lips. Nice little head rush. Try it, Walt. Come on. He holds the bottle by its neck and swings it in front of me like a hypnotists pocket watch. Getting thirsty. Getting very thirsty The numbskulls around him pretend theyre going under, drooping their heads and fluttering their eyelids.

A sip, someone says. Just one, says someone else.

I shake my head. Im sorry. No.

And so I go on to college, and they dont.

P ercentile is destiny in America.

Four years after that bus ride to the testing center, Im slumped on a shabby sofa in the library of a Princeton University eating club, waiting to feel the effects of two black capsules that someone said would help me finish writing my overdue application for a Rhodes Scholarship. Im chain-smoking, too, and I have been for an hourMarlboro Lights with their filters twisted off, whose butts I drop into a can of Dr Pepper spiked with Smirnoff vodka. Im seven pounds lighter than I was in high school but not as trim and perhaps not quite as tall, my center of gravity having sunk closer to chair level. I need glasses, too. I doubt that the cause is too much reading, though; thanks to my flair for academic shortcuts and an impression Ive gained from certain professors that the Great Books are not as great as advertised (and may indeed be pernicious instruments of social manipulation and oppression), Ive done much less reading here than I expected. No, I blame my dimming vision, as I do my sagging physique and my reliance on chemical pick-me-ups, on a gradual neurological withdrawal from a place that no longer seemed to want me once it decided, by some fluke, to have me.