“I’m sorry to drag you in here like this,” he ventures. “I know you’re busy.”
That would have been true an hour earlier, when I had a job, the kind of job this man couldn’t do in a million years. He’s never been in a newsroom full of frantic people, with editors yelling for copy and copyboys rushing around and hysterical reporters using the word “fuck” as a noun, a verb, and even an adverb (i.e., “You are the fucking slowest copyboy in the world!”).
No, Mr. Plymouth’s pressure is a different kind of pressure, the pressure to get the boys placed in Ivy League colleges so the school can maintain its prestige and continue to have desperate parents clamoring to hurl their money at him.
“Don’t apologize,” I say. “Just tell me what’s going on.”
The headmaster opens his desk drawer and pulls out a couple of sheets of loose-leaf paper covered in jagged, spiky writing I immediately recognize as my son’s.
“I’d like you to look at this,” he says softly. “It’s an essay your son composed yesterday in English class. It was a little exercise in spontaneous expression, assigned by Mr. Edmondson. The topic was ‘The Cold Truth.’”
“The cold truth about what?”
“That was entirely up to the student. He could take the title and go any which way with it. I think you’ll be interested in your son’s choice.”
He passes the pages to me. I take my time getting out my reading glasses, which I’ve only begun to wear after decades of squinting at the green glow of computer screens. I’m a little bit nervous, I’ll admit, but at the same time it’s a joy to read something that’s actually been penned by a human hand for a change, however disturbing it might turn out to be.
THE COLD TRUTH
by Jacob Perez-Sullivan
You don’t know it when you’re a kid, because nobody tells you, but the key to life is being in the right clubs, pretty much from the time you start walking.
Nobody sells it to you that way—in fact, they try to spin it the other way, so that it seems important to embrace and understand as many different kinds of people as you can in the course of your lifetime—but the truth is, that’s not the truth.
Far from it. It’s important to get into the right preschool, because this will naturally lead to the right elementary school, followed by the right high school, and then, of course, the right college.
The college is to this process what the orgasm is to the sex act. Anyone who makes it all the way through the other schools only to drop the ball when it comes to college has not understood the process. You don’t belong to exclusionary groups all your life just to start mixing in with the general population at age eighteen. It makes a mockery of your entire life, not to mention the monumental waste of your parents’ money.
The clubhouse life is a true commitment, made first by the parents and then by us, the students, by the time we’re old enough to ride a two-wheeler. We get the point. Nobody has to spell it out for us. It’s not a complicated or sophisticated strategy.
The saddest thing about the clubhouse life (there are many sad things, but we only have fifteen minutes to write this essay) is the fact that we only get to know each other. A school like ours is careful to stir the occasional African-American or Hispanic into the mix, but that’s not for the benefit of those students, who are hand-picked for their apparent harmlessness.
No, those students are here so that the rest of us won’t freak out every time we go to a cash machine and there’s a member of a minority waiting behind us.
This is part of the clubhouse process—recognizing the fact that now and then, we must step outside the clubhouse, whether we like it or not. Step out, and then quickly step back in. And shut the door fast, lest an outsider follow you inside.
You’re either in a good club, or you’re in a bad club. The walls are there, whether you see them or not. It’s all about the walls, and which side of the walls you’re on.
That’s the cold truth. It isn’t pretty, and it isn’t fair, but it’s the cold truth. I can only hope the day will come when this sham just cannot go on, and the entire system collapses under the weight of its own bullshit. Maybe then, life will be fair.
When I finish reading the essay I continue holding the pages, just to stare at the symmetry of my son’s handwriting. It’s a beautiful thing. Nothing has been crossed out. It just flowed out of him, as if he’d been waiting all his young life to express these thoughts. And yet, according to the headmaster, he’d knocked it out just moments after getting the assignment in “spontaneous expression.”
At last I look up at the headmaster, whose face is as blank as a blackboard on the first day of school.
“Quite an essay,” he ventures. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
“I certainly would.”
“Naturally Mr. Edmondson was alarmed when he read it, and quite rightly he brought it to my attention.”
“Alarmed?”
“Of course! This is clearly just a peek into something much more disturbing that your son is experiencing. It’s the reason I called you here.”
“You called me here because my ex-wife is out of town. I know I’m number two on the emergency phone call list.”
“Mr. Sullivan, I hardly think this is the time to quibble over parental rivalries.”
“Have you spoken with my son about this essay?”
His face darkens. “That’s another reason I called you. Yes, I have spoken with him. Sometimes students do things like this in an attempt to be satirical. If that were the case, well, fine. We could all just laugh it off. But according to your son, he meant every word of it. Every single word.”
“I’m sure he did.”
“We gave him the chance to apologize, and he refused.”
“Apologize for what?”
Mr. Plymouth’s eyes widen. “Mr. Sullivan. Did you read the essay? He called this school a sham! He wants the entire system to collapse!”
“Under the weight of its own bullshit,” I add helpfully.
“That’s how he put it, yes. He wasn’t exactly subtle about it.”
“What did he say when you asked for an apology?”
“He said, and I quote, ‘I wouldn’t have written it if I didn’t mean it.’”
“He saw through your game.”
The headmaster falls back in his chair, as if he’s just been hit in the chest with a medicine ball. He stares at me in wonder. “I beg your pardon?”
“I said, he saw through your game. You. This place.” I gesture at the walls of his office. “He got to the guts of your game. He saw the Wizard of Oz, hiding behind the curtain. That’s what’s bothering you, Headmaster Plymouth.”
CHAPTER THREE
The headmaster stares at me in openmouthed disbelief.
“This is not a game,” he says evenly.
“Come on.”
“Mr. Sullivan—”
“Listen, I know what it’s like. I write for the New York Star, and every once in a while I’m interviewing somebody who can tell the angle I’m working, you know? He can tell I’m trying to get him to say something I need to make my story work, and he just won’t give it to me. Happens maybe once every hundred interviews, and when it does it really stings, but what can you do? Not everybody’s an idiot.”