One day they dragged me over to gifted and talented. I was nine or eight. Left the regular classroom went to the one with the seagreen concrete blocks. They had chess in there and some other little kid was playing Mozart on the Casio. The teacher was a woman with Sally Jesse Rafael glasses and a brown clownwig. I took a seat with some other kids and they were doing math problems for fun and I just sat there. The teacher asked me what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to do anything. But then one of the kids said I was the one who had drawn the cat playing the tuba. And the polar bear on stand up bass. So then I was given some paper and markers and colored pencils and the teacher loomed over me. I drew a dog trying to pluck a harp. This went on for a couple weeks. Every Wednesday over there with the kids who were teaching themselves French and who were trying to solve the Freudian square root of their father’s unhappiness. I used to draw a lot of monsters drinking coffee. One day the teacher pulled me aside and told me I wasn’t gifted or talented and they’d made a mistake. So in the middle of the day she kicked me out and sent me back to general population. Which I really appreciated.
Love this so much, so poignant and side-splittingly hilarious. I read this line over and over and over and still cannot stop laughing: "those after school specials were the kid takes one puff of a joint and becomes a kill crazy maniac and murders a bunch of nuns and then gets chased by all the police in the state until he drives the car off a cliff and the car hits the bottom of the canyon and explodes into a fireball."
Just Learning Now
Love this so much, so poignant and side-splittingly hilarious. I read this line over and over and over and still cannot stop laughing: "those after school specials were the kid takes one puff of a joint and becomes a kill crazy maniac and murders a bunch of nuns and then gets chased by all the police in the state until he drives the car off a cliff and the car hits the bottom of the canyon and explodes into a fireball."