I’ve been called a genius so many times that it feels like an insult. I’d like to meet the genius that wants to be one. These days, you’ve got plenty. I happen to be a genius in the ham and cheese department, but then you’ve got the arts, science, and math. There are salesmen of note, bullshit artists in general, and more than a few losers. I had a waiter the other day that was a genius. He wore it like a bad smell.
In 1963 the nuns gave us a test. They told us in advance that the score didn’t matter. In fact, we wouldn’t be finding out the score, since it was more of an experiment than a test. So we all sat there, tongues hanging out, our #2 pencils filling out dots, entering numbers, and figuring out puzzles. It was more fun than I’d ever had at school. I felt bad about the third problem from the end, since I knew the answer was wrong, but by then I wasn’t paying attention.
After a couple of days, they said that a few of us would have to take the test again. The nun read a list that included the dumbest, most frightening kids in school, whose scores were so low that they were getting another chance. I was also on the list. I didn’t tell my mother. My heart raced until they re-tested us, which happened a few days later. I was more scared to be in a room with those guys than I was to take the test. I figured my only way out was to correct the antepenultimate question, which I did.
After that, things got really bad. The others settled on me as their bitch before the test was over. I finished first, but the nun wouldn’t let me leave, so I spent a half hour listening to some scary dudes whisper to me that I was a dead man, that I shouldn’t walk home alone, and that they wanted to fuck my mother and my sister. This led to more years of merciless bullying, but it was nothing compared to the nuns, who began every subsequent encounter with the declaration that I was not special, that I was just like everyone else, and that I shouldn’t get ideas. They all wanted to slap me across the face, and they all did.
When I was 4, my brother was getting ready for Confirmation, which is like a Catholic Bar Mitzvah. Back then, they held out the Baltimore Catechism as something we were obliged to memorize in our lifetime, which I’m sure no person in their right mind ever did. But before Confirmation, a kid had to memorize everything up to and including The Act of Contrition, which was the Mount Everest of prayers.
My brother struggled in a sweat at the kitchen table, my mother bearing down on him as he tried to recite the prayer as written, unable to get past: Oh my God I am heartily sorry. I loitered outside the kitchen door, listened to him read it through, and was amazed that he couldn’t repeat but seven words when he was finished. That he could read at all rendered him awesome, since I had yet to learn. I felt sorry for him in that moment, so I stepped thru the door and into the light. I recited the prayer perfectly, hoping to get my mother off his back, since the prayer is what she wanted to hear.
When I finished, they stared at me in the same way: bug eyed, mouths open. I was delighted. Then my brother launched himself across the table and began to beat the shit out of me. My mother pulled him off, but only to ask me: who do you think you are and how dare you? Then she slapped me across the face. I was struck dumb, and it was my first inkling that I should stay that way.
I was watching TV with my mother last week. We saw a guy who has the highest IQ on record. This guy is such a thug that the Guinness Book of Records got rid of the category, like they were suddenly ashamed of what intelligence really is, since even at its most optimistic, intelligence can paint a pretty bleak picture.
There was no denying that this guy was smart. He could see a world rid of disease, ecologically stable, and at peace in less than three generations, which is only 60 years. And he could even walk you through it. He could walk any idiot through it, since most of his social encounters were with drunks. That’s because he was a bouncer in a bar in Montana, so he was good at communicating with cowboys angling for a fight.
What most impressed me about the guy was his theory of God, which is more or less my own, and not a theory everyone would be likely to adopt, since belief plays no part. But in order to rid the world of disease, make peace, and save mankind from oblivion, it’s the only God you can afford. God, he said, is in the mind of man, and he is no less God for residing there. We perceive order. We can see deep into the past and far into the future. God is logic. I am God, he said.
This guy was huge, so you didn’t want to argue with him. So the guy off-camera asks if he should rule the world, and the bouncer says: why not? If I’m the smartest guy in the world, I should. If they find somebody smarter, I’ll follow him, no problem.
It was hard to imagine this guy ceding much ground, with world leadership determined in a cage match being the only imaginable way to decide. The guy off-camera is sold, so he asks him what he would do as the leader of mankind, and the genius doesn’t hesitate. He starts with worldwide birth control and a eugenics program, which pretty much takes care of health and ecology. Nations would be abolished, children taken from their parents, and all races mixed. Logic and Ethics would become our religion. If we don’t do these things, he said, mankind is doomed to perish.
My mother sat rapt through the whole thing. I could see that she was thinking of ways to use this guy. Maybe he could start as an Assemblyman, work his way up to Congress, which is how she sees world leadership – machine politics with Democrats in charge. Her only comment came at the end, one sentence to him as his face loomed on TV: I have some news for you, Mr. Genius.
