The Bialy Pimps (4 page)

Enclosed is an invitation to the inauguration of the newly-elected members of our state senate. If it is possible for you to attend, I would like at this event to present you with our state’s prestigious Governor’s Award, which I personally give to one individual each year who my staff and I deem particularly worthy of praise in the pursuit of personal and social greatness. Last year’s recipient, Nobel Laureate Dr. Kevin Miller, will also be in attendance, and would very much like to meet your son and extend to him a personal invitation to join the staff of his laboratory at American University. Dr. Miller was particularly intrigued with the report that your son wrote for his fourth-grade science course entitled “The Role of Chromatin Remodelers in PEV-Mediated Gene Silencing in Telomere-Proximal Regions of the
Caenorhabditis elegans
Genome” and asked me if I thought your son would be interested in a post-doctoral position or even a possible opening for an assistant professor.
 

I hope that you will choose to attend. Please call my office to RSVP, and I look forward to meeting you.

It was signed by the governor. Mrs. Dipshit turned to her son, who had removed his pants and was chewing on the sofa, and beamed. She could hardly believe her son’s achievement in not writing a scientific journal article that had attracted the commendation of the office of the governor. His years of not slaving over books all night long and not driving himself to the point of exhaustion were worth the lack of effort. Although he had given up nothing and not made every sacrifice of himself in the name of his education, he had achieved the recognition that he so fully did not deserve. A mother could not be more proud.

She was so proud that she immediately ran the invitation through the shredder mounted over the study trash can. As an important person herself (although by no means as important as her boy was proving himself to be), she had no more time that she could afford to spend on the support of her son’s education. She had been run ragged in the past few weeks in keeping up with the increasing demands of her son’s limitless brilliance: scanning the internet for trivia, sleeping with faculty from the university for the answers to pages and pages of tests that were, by now, National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health grant applications and Ph.D. qualifying exams. She had been foolish, however, in allowing her son to write the article which she had Xeroxed from a recent issue of the scientific journal
Genes and Development
. In writing the article, her son had exceeded even her already lofty expectations and was inviting even higher performance expectations which would take her even longer to fill.

Out of respect for her own valuable time, Mrs. Dipshit pretended on all accounts as if she had never received the governor’s letter. One year later, she received a second letter expressing the governor’s deepest regrets that they had been unable to meet the previous year and making an unprecedented second offer of the Governor’s Award and full tenure at M.I.T. to Captain Dipshit if he would join the governor at the inauguration this year. His mother beamed with even more motherly pride and ran the new letter through the shredder. The Captain’s father fully endorsed the support that his mother was giving young Captain Dipshit.

“You’re an asshole,” he told her.

In the next months, plagued by an increasing fear of further demands on her time, Mrs. Dipshit began to allow her son’s performance to slip slightly, to Ph.D. level. The damage was already done, however, and soon universities, many of them highly prestigious, began to offer Captain Dipshit scholarships. The mailbox was flooded with invitations, awards, and offers of free money. It got to the point where the mailman had to start leaving a good portion of the mail on the ground beside the mailbox because the box itself was filled to capacity. Eventually, the postman refused to continue delivering the Dipshits’ mail because he was carrying twice the mail of anyone else while still receiving the same salary. The post office informed the family that they would have to start coming to pick up their mail if they wished to keep receiving it, and the Postmaster even sent them an angry letter on official stationary which the Postmaster himself, after a long internal struggle, decided to conclude with the simple exclamation “Fuckhead!”
 

Mrs. Dipshit began to panic. Like any good recluse, she had had exactly the opposite effect on the public’s insistent eye than she had hoped, and soon began to find her son’s picture on
Time
,
Newsweek
, and
People
with captions like “THE NEXT EINSTEIN?” and “SUPERCHILD.” She could not open the blinds without meeting the unblinking glass eyes of news cameras and could not open the front door without having a bouquet of microphones thrust into her face. They all wanted to know how she did it, what the boy could do, and what his plans were for the future. It was a miserable life, and the entire Dipshit family found themselves unable to move freely and flittingly from activity to activity as befitted a group of important individuals. Mr. Dipshit continued to pay the bills impatiently and was able to impatiently struggle through throngs of reporters to get to his car in order to drive to the post office to
get
the bills, but he began to find that due to the hundreds of people camping out on his lawn, the grass could only be mowed in a painstakingly measured way. This demanded a degree of patience that Mr. Dipshit was unable and unwilling to devote to any one activity, especially because he had to part the throngs as if he were cutting through the Amazonian bush in order to move forward. He gave it up completely after accidentally running over and nearly amputating the toe of one particularly stubborn newswoman. The problem eventually resolved itself when the grass began to die from constantly being trampled on.

As the Dipshits continued to assert that they had no time to talk to reporters, the zeal of the reporters increased. The trek to the car for Mr. Dipshit’s trips to the post office became more and more difficult, and the post office employees began to spit on him when he came in each day, yelling and swearing at him for making their jobs next to impossible. Eventually, he had to call the Postmaster to complain.

“Fuckhead!” snapped the voice curtly on the other end of the line, and then the connection was broken. Mrs. Dipshit, who had heard the tin-can voice from across the room, fell over in a dead faint.

At the height of the commotion, the entire family crawled out of bed late one night while the reporters were the most dormant, packed a precious few articles in a single backpack, and, on their bellies, snaked their way to freedom through the mud of their own yard, under the news vans and through serpentine mazes of hanging cords. By the time the sun rose the next morning, they were in a new town in a new state – Columbus, Ohio. They had new names and new social security numbers. Captain Dipshit was enrolled in public school for the first time, as his mother decided that his brilliance should be hidden from the world until the Captain had grown old enough and impatient enough to deal with its ramifications by himself.
 
To further secure their anonymity, Mrs. Dipshit insisted that the entire family wear sunglasses and fake mustaches for a full six months, a practice which finally came to a frightening end when Captain Dipshit brought in a family portrait for a school project and his teacher remarked how unusual it was for both a ten year-old boy and his mother to have full Groucho Marx mustaches. The next day, the Captain came to school
sans
mustache and glasses and subsequently had to endure rounds of questions as to who he was and what he had done with the mustached boy. Mrs. Dipshit wore hers for another few months just to be on the safe side.

Occasionally, tauntingly, a postcard bearing the seal of the Office of the Postmaster of their old town would come in the mail with only the word “Fuckhead!” written on it in an angular scrawl. This invariably caused Mrs. Dipshit to faint dramatically and, moreover, eerily often onto a protruding countertop or down a flight of stairs. She began to refuse to get the mail at all. If she ever absolutely had to, she would lay down on the ground beside the mailbox and reach up to pull the mail from it so that if another one of the mysterious cards appeared, she wouldn’t fall and injure herself.

Captain Dipshit fared well in and enjoyed school, despite his mother’s fears that its drudging pace would bore her son to tears and force him to turn to drugs. Mrs. Dipshit panicked often about the prospect of her son being forced to turn to drugs, and told him often not to be lured by them to alleviate his troubles. As he entered junior high school, she began to tell him regularly that there were other ways to deal with the boredom caused by his intellectual superiority.

“There are no other ways to deal with the boredom caused by my intellectual superiority,” he told his friends one day over a joint, having figured out that his family would curse the school system rather than him if they ever found out. He also knew that his incredible incompetence in just about every subject would be blamed on the incredible incompetence of the school system.

In high school, his parents’ penchant for healthiness began for the first time to truly make an impression on him, because he discovered that it could save him an enormous amount of time.

“Creamed corn or green beans?” the lunch lady asked him mechanically one day, eyeing him with acute disinterest.

“Whatever’s healthiest,” the teenager replied. He received green beans, which he hated.

“Ham or chicken?” the caterer at his aunt’s wedding asked him on one other occasion.

“Whatever’s healthiest,” replied the boy, who found himself later with ham, which repulsed him.

Healthiness was a tremendous timesaver – perhaps the greatest timesaver ever invented. It also spared him the anguish of deciding what he wanted in just about any given circumstance, which amounted usually to a significant savings of precious seconds and even more precious brainpower. He reasoned that the brain could only have a limited capacity for thought – indeed, a fixed number of individual thoughts – and that once you used it all, you were screwed. The Captain intended on living for a very long time, possibly forever, and was not about to waste thoughts now. If he found himself with a surplus of thoughts when he was ninety, he might splurge and make all sorts of decisions then. But not now. That would be foolish.

In time, he happened on an amazing realization. His healthiness could be even more broadly applicable than he had ever dreamed! Any number of questions could be answered with “Whatever’s healthiest”:

“Smoking or non-smoking?”

“Aisle or window seat?”

“Single or double prints?”

“Will you be paying with cash or a credit card?”

“How many eggs make up a gross?”

“To be or not to be?”

and “What in hell is the matter with you?”

At the peak of his personal revelation, it was an unfortunate coincidence that Captain Dipshit began to be beaten down by the world. Everywhere he went, people began to give him what he didn’t want and to try – probably due to jealousy of his amazing mind – to squash his spirit and personal greatness.
 

“These tires are all bald,” a greasy-fingered mechanic reported to him by way of explanation after he skidded off the road in a snow storm. He glanced up at the Captain’s car, suspended in the air at the garage by the massive hydraulic lift, and touched a featureless black tire. “You’ll need all new tires.”

He waited to be sure that the teenager was absorbing what he was saying, saw that he was shifting his weight nervously from foot to foot, and continued, “We recommend the thicker tread tires for the snow, but if you’re pressed for cash...” he smiled deviously, as if passing on a secret, “...the cheaper ones will get you by just fine. What do you say?”

Captain Dipshit barely allowed the mechanic to finish his exceedingly long-winded sermon before succinctly replying, “Whatever’s healthiest.”

The mechanic, who felt that he was being kind in offering to help this unkempt young man, frowned in confusion. “What? I’m asking you what kind of
tires
you want.”

The Captain repeated that he wanted whichever tires were healthiest and shot sharp, hurried glances around the shop to underscore the fact that he had no more time to waste. Two hours later, he paid the mechanic $650 and drove from the tire shop on his old bald tires, which had been gouged severely with a leather punch to disguise their identity.

Everywhere he went, he was treated rudely and received poor service. He began to look on the world with hurt, mournful eyes which pleaded for an answer to the question of why he was hated because he had been born smarter than everybody else. He felt trampled on and kicked and played the part to the hilt. It was for this reason that he was so relieved to find a similar group of people when he began college at The Ohio State University. They made him feel at home.

His new friends smoked a lot of pot, drank a lot of beer, and oozed intellectuality. They were a group of people who had been born too late to be hippies but liked the idea of free love and Mary Jane and patched bell-bottom pants so much that they decided that they were going to be the new hippies, even though they knew nothing about any wars or peace movements or about protest against anything but not recycling.
 

Captain Dipshit found the nouveau-hippies fascinating, with their dirty, tangled dredlocked hair and poems like:

“Oh man, this like sucks that the world is so materialistic.

Let’s live in peace with the Earth and, like, eat vegetables.

Peace and love, man.
 

Pet a tree.”

Although they were obviously not as brilliant as he was, their talent for directionless existence and self-pity was far more honed than his own. They spent long, thoughtful nights high as kites and gorging intermittently on salty snacks as the urges struck them, talking about things that sounded brilliant when they were high, like when someone said, “Man, what if like, God is a plant?” Captain Dipshit sat up straight in stunned awe and stayed that way for some time. He pondered the question for weeks afterward before he was able to fathom a reply.