Moms and Dads, if the school system tries to persuade you that your kid is so dang smart he'd be happier in the next grade up, don't let them bullyrag you into skipping. It's traumatizing, take it from me. True, he may find himself studying at a level that engages his intellect; but the kids he left behind resent it, and the kids in the higher grade resent it. Being too smart is just not a good way to make friends in grade school. Insist, demand, that the teacher give him more challenging stuff to do. Don't cave in.
I seemed like a bright kid, why, look at all those pictures I'd filled up my tablets with: dinosaurs and spacemen and things. And I knew all those big words, from my steady diet of comic books. Mom and Dad caved.
So I skipped third grade. Big mistake. That's where they taught multiplication and division. The fourth graders were plowing ahead into the twilight zone of fractions and percentages and 'decimoes' and I was already hamstrung. But wait! Help is on the way!
In the late fifties, when those darn Godless Commie Rooskies put a satellite in orbit and the USA realized its schools were churning out morons instead of rocket scientists, some bright lads came up with a solution guaranteed to turn American kids into Brainiacs: a travesty called the NEW MATH.
So here I was in fifth grade trying to make sense of this incomprehensible gibberish. I've never really been sure that the teacher understood it, but she was just following orders. And my parents certainly couldn't help me with my homework: they didn't get it either. NOBODY got it.
Unfortunately this was the sixties, not the eighties, and victimhood hadn't become fashionable yet. And here's where the old stigma of 'skipping a grade' reared up: "Oh, no, you're not taking basic math, you need to be in Mrs. Brown's Advanced Algebra Class."
Pleading my case got me the stonewall. "You just need to apply yourself harder. You're not working up to your potential." Uh-huh, you're a math teacher in a junior high in Kansas, and I'M not working up to MY potential?
But my bored-to-tears frustration paid off by high school. My notebooks, crammed with elaborate hot-rod monsters and space aliens destroying cities (and some lovingly rendered nudes,) got me noticed by the ambitious kids running for Student Council. Now I got to draw posters. I drew posters, buttons, and banners for every candidate running for every office. Totally non-partisan, and totally mercenary.
I know, what I should've done was barter with them for some math tutoring, but I was afraid they'd realize I was a moron who just happened to draw well.
In my junior year my coordination went to hell and I began to trip over my own ankles. Very embarrassing but especially in high school, where it's imperative that you remain Cool at all times.
Debilitating, excruciating headaches, like being slammed in the base of the skull with an iron pipe, not once, but once every minute, all day. My eyesight, which had always been poor, suddenly split in half; and trying to drive was absolute hell, since I now saw two identical lines of traffic streaming right at me, merging right in front of the windshield, and passing on either side of my head.
(Moms and Dads, if your car-obsessed teenager is suddenly terrified of getting behind the wheel, take note. It may NOT be "just a phase.")
The vertigo became a round-the-clock nightmare. Sometimes I'd wake up with my bedroom totally upside down, the bed hanging from the ceiling and me staring terrified at the floor, knowing I was seconds away from crashing down. I'd grip the mattress for hours until it passed or I fell asleep from exhaustion. It's hard work keeping a bed on the ceiling!
I finally began puking up blood on my 16th birthday and the family chiropractor, who had regularly warned my parents not to let "the butcher boys" get hold of me, reluctantly admitted this might be something beyond his scope.
By the time they (the real medical doctors) found the brain tumor I weighed less than 80 pounds (on a six-foot-three frame) and was suffering from synesthesia: that's where the distinction between your senses blurs and you taste light, hear colors, feel odors, and so forth. A few years later I discovered this state of mind could be artificially induced, and people I knew were doing it regularly!
So they scooped out that tennis-ball-sized sucker, sewed my head up and sent me home to die. Which I refused to do, since I've never taken suggestions well. I got stronger, gained a few pounds and frantically studied everything I'd missed to catch up with my classmates. And...there I was, a high school senior. Weak, wobbly, but with brain, and drawing ability, apparently intact.
I made my first sale - a local rock band poster. Ten dollars!
But an ugly family situation prevented my cashing in on the scholarships I'd been assured of. Things got unbearable: I was thrown out of the house at the age of seventeen, and found a $30-a-month room. In desperation I worked every scut job I could find, saved some money, finagled a student loan, and got as far as the middle of my junior year in college before fatigue and poverty overtook me. I dropped out to throw newspapers for three years; hurling 1000 newspapers a day from a pickup whether it was sunny or ice storms were shattering the trees.
Pretty discouraging. I still sold an occasional rock poster but I was a paperboy for godsake. Then my friend Beth said she'd heard that a Vo-Tech in Salina had a commercial art course. A Vo-tech?
I checked it out. I went. I graduated. Now I was a professional.
Okay, the job offers didn't come cascading in, but I managed to find sporadic freelance gigs while working a series of day jobs. I made rubber stamps. I made pizzas. I worked in a community center. And I fell madly in love with a purty woman, six-three with legs up to here.
Boy, was she thrilled that I was A Nartist. What a great plan she had: she'd do all the legwork, finding jobs, billing customers, filing, phoning. All I had to do was sit in my studio and Do Art.
But as soon as Son Number One came along, she was out the door as soon as I got home, leaving me to be Mr. Mom while she partied all night.
Then I got a call from a screenprinting company I'd done some artwork for. The Art Director was expecting, would I be interested in coming in two or three days a week while she took Pregnancy Leave? Does a bear...? Well, you know. And here came Son Number Two.
So now the checks, though still small, were coming in regularly. The part-time temporary job became a full-time permanent job. Now I really was a professional.
Meanwhile the madness at home accelerated. Counseling helped a while, but by the time Son Number Three showed up, I was the Other Man in my own marriage. And too broke to file. So I endured: chronic lack of money, utilities shut off, continual threats of repossession and foreclosure, the Payday Loan nightmare. But worst of all: my sobbing children waking me up at 3 a.m. wanting to know where Mom was. Finally it happened - I was so broke I couldn't afford to declare bankruptcy, but since she was technically broker, Legal Aid gave her a free divorce.
But now I could freelance full-time, right? Well, yes and no. There was the money issue, what with child support, no unemployment comp, and my company's generous two-week (!) severance package. And there was the recognition thing, my having toiled in anonymity for fifteen years. So I had to hit the ground running. Praise the Lord - I landed a job with a bindery. And four months later the company downsized, and there I was, jobless...on Labor Day, no less.
Then 9-11 happened, and suddenly, my own little melodrama didn't seem so significant.
I went to work reading newspapers for a press clipping service, an amazingly fatiguing job, but I was grateful to be at work again. I worked like the proverbial peon and survived a number of scut jobs and finally, decades after setting out, wound up in the land of Milk and Honey - Lawrence KS.
Brilliant! I move to a town that's crawling with starving artists? Where was my head at...?
But I love this place. If you're in town, look me up and we'll go out for chicken-fried steak.
And oh yeah ... I'm still a little vague on multiplication and division.
Greg Volpert, a Nartist, 2007
