Election. Tom Perrotta
the momentary star of tabloids and talk shows. All year long my junior Current Events class returned again and again to a single theme, what the media liked to call “the Character Issue”: How are private virtue and public responsibility intertwined? Can you be an adulterer and a good President? A sexual pervert and an effective, impartial member of the judiciary?
It's fair to say that these questions interested me more than my students. Like most American adolescents, the kids at Winwood High didn't pay too much attention to the Supreme Court or the race for the White House. Their concerns were narrower—school, sports, sex, the unforgiving politics of the hallway and locker room.
But we also had the Glen Ridge rape case to discuss. My students were fascinated by this sad and sordid story, and it became the nexus where their concerns linked up with those of the larger democracy. The case had not yet gone to trial at that point, but the kids at Winwood knew the details inside and out. A group of high school athletes—the golden boys of Glen Ridge—had been charged with luring a retarded girl into a basement, forcing her to commit a variety of sexual acts, and then penetrating her vagina with a broomstick and a baseball bat. None of the defendants denied the event had occurred. Their defense was that the girl had consented.
We had developmentally disabled kids at Winwood, and we had football heroes, too; the gap between them was immense, almost medieval. It wasn't too hard to imagine how a lonely, mildly retarded girl might consider it a privilege of sorts to be molested and applauded by the jock royalty of her little world. They were the ones with the power of conferring recognition and acceptance. If they saw you, you existed.
Given the similarities between Winwood and Glen Ridge—we were only separated by a couple of exits on the Parkway—it didn't really surprise me that the overwhelming majority of my class, girls included, sided with the defendants and their right to a good time. If a girl, even a retarded girl, was dumb enough to join a troop of red-blooded boys in a basement, then who could blame the boys for taking advantage of this windfall?
I had my own opinion of the defendants—I wanted to see them convicted and sent to prison, where they could find out for themselves what it meant to be scared and weak and lonely—but I kept it to myself in the classroom, opting instead for the more neutral roles of moderator and devil's advocate.
“They were strong and she was weak,” I pointed out. “So don't the strong have a responsibility not to hurt or humiliate the weak?”
Lisa Flanagan ventured the first response. She was exactly the kind of kid I was trying to reach, a smart, unhappy girl who wanted nothing more than to be accepted by the jock/cheerleader aristocracy at Winwood and had no idea—how could she?—of how relieved she was going to be to find a different world in college, more charitable standards of value.
“Mr. M.,” she said helpfully, as if cluing me in to the true nature of the world, “that's not how it works. The strong take what they want.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Might makes right, Lisa? Is that what you're trying to tell me?” I pointed at Dino Mikulski, the steroid monster in our midst, a 285-pound brick of zits and muscle who already had major college football coaches drooling over their playbooks. “If you're correct in your analysis, then I move that Dino be declared President of the United States. I have no doubt that he could take George Bush in a fair fight and therefore deserves to be our leader.”
Lisa got my point. Her face tightened with dismay as Dino and his lackeys exchanged high fives, celebrating his sudden ascension to the leadership of the Free World. I was pleased to see Paul Warren's hand shoot up.
“Those Glen Ridge guys are scum,” he declared, silencing the room with the force of his judgment. “That girl didn't deserve what they did to her.”
If I had to stick a pin in the map of the past and say, There, that's where it all started, I guess I'd choose that moment.
PAUL WARREN
IT WAS LIKE I'd just opened my eyes after a sixteen-year nap and was wide awake for the first time in my life, seeing things for what they were. I'd check out the news, and where it just used to be a blur of names and faces, now it was like, “Holy shit, people are killing each other. Little kids are starving to death.”
Mr. M. was a big part of that. He wasn't your ordinary teacher, slouching in front of the blackboard, droning on about nothing for the whole period, the boredom thickening until it came to seem like a climate, the weather we lived in until the bell rang. He had a way of explaining complicated things so they made sense to you, connecting current events with familiar details from our own lives, asking questions that really made you think.
“You've all puked,” I remember him saying one day. “I know I have. It's no big deal. People figure you're sick, or maybe you drank too much. But when George Bush loses his lunch in Japan, it's a national crisis. Now why do you think that is? What makes his vomit so different from yours or mine?”
Way more than Mr. M., though, it was the meltdown between my parents that snapped me out of my daze. There's nothing like your mom kicking your dad out of the house to make you play back the tape of your existence and see it all in a whole new light.
I'm like, Okay, now I get it. Dad wasn't working late. And Mom wasn't crying over those stupid TV movies. Our life was a soap opera, not a sitcom. And that whole time, with the clock ticking and our house waiting to explode, I was living in a dream world, grunting in the basement with Van Halen blasting, trying to bench two-fifteen, or hiding in my room with the Victoria's Secret catalogue, studying those pictures the way I should have been studying math. (Can somebody tell me why those women don't have nipples? It kind of drives me crazy.) My sister thinks I'm a moron for not catching on sooner. She and Mom are pretty tight; they knew about Dad and Sarah Stiller months before the news trickled down to me.
In my defense, I was preoccupied by major life questions. After football season, I took the PSATs along with everybody else in my class who wanted to go to college, and thought I did okay. But then the envelope arrives and it turns out that I got the third-highest score in all of Winwood High. At first I thought it must be some kind of computer error. I was just a B student, coasting through school with a minimum of pain and effort. For as long as I could remember, people had been saying that Tammy was the smart one in the family.
Those scores aren't supposed to mean that much, but they changed everything for me. I started thinking that maybe I could get into a decent college; maybe I could even make it through law school. Maybe I don't have to be a card-carrying corporate drone like Dad after all, another ant in the ant farm.
I'm sorry for Mr. M. I wish he hadn't done what he did, especially not on my behalf. But I'm also eternally grateful to him for recognizing the change in me and encouraging me to act on it. The day he asked me to run for President was one of the proudest in my life.
MR. M.
PAUL WAS THE perfect candidate—varsity fullback, National Merit semifinalist, a good-looking, genuinely nice kid without an ounce of arrogance or calculation. He was smart, but unlike his sister Tammy, he didn't wear his IQ on his sleeve. In fact, if you didn't know him well, you could have easily drawn the conclusion that he wasn't the swiftest guy in the world, with that pumped-up body of his and those utterly vacant blue eyes.
I didn't bullshit him about service to school or any of that. As faculty advisor to the Student Government Association, no one knew better than me that the post of President was entirely ceremonial. All you presided over were a handful of meetings and a couple of bake sales.
“You're a smart guy,” I told him. “But the admissions people at the selective schools are going to notice the gap between your grades and your board scores. The only thing that's going to convince them to take a chance on you is the right mix of extracurriculars.
Varsity sports look great on your application, but nothing beats President of your school. They really eat that up.”
Paul blushed—he did that whenever anyone