Lost in the Meritocracy (v5) Read Online Free PDF Page A

intoxication, the link was forged.
    I kept my wicked sniffing secret—I had a reputation to protect. Somehow I’d come to school with it: the good boy. The boy who let other students go first in line, who kept his lips from touching the water fountain, and who never asked to use the bathroom outside of designated breaks. When the teachers’ felt erasers clogged up with chalk dust, I was the boy who carried them outside and pounded them clean against a wall, raising as much white powder as possible so I’d be coated in it when I returned. This entitled me to more gold stars as well as permission to wash up in the lavatory, where I could also relieve my pent-up bladder. There, I’d pump pink liquid soap into my palms, dry my skin with a rough brown paper towel, and reemerge with a new smell: bright-boy clean.
    My favorite school odor those first few years belonged to a part-time music teacher, Ms. Hannah, a brown-eyed hippie girl with feather earrings and Navajo-like, lustrous dark hair. She wore, beneath her colorful loose clothes, a blend of plant oils that smelled like my idea of the tropical ports in Uncle Admiral’s photos. Her job was to lead our third-grade music units. Everything was a “unit” at my school—or, in the later grades, a “module.” The term evoked a machine part. It suggested that learning could be engineered, and that it had been, perhaps by government scientists—the same ones behind the Apollo program, maybe, about which we were constantly shown filmstrips. Our education, we got the sense, was related to matters of great national importance. It was part of an effort to keep America strong, most notably in the physical-fitness certificates that were personally signed by President Nixon, which I was still too young to compete for.
    How music might aid this drive for global leadership I wasn’t sure. Our first unit seemed frivolous. Ms. Hannah unpacked a carton of wooden blocks, called us forward, gave two blocks to each of us, then sent us back to the cockpit-style desks that reminded me of the belted seats on amusement rides at the state fair. “Today we’re exploring rhythm,” Ms. Hannah announced. She clapped together her own two blocks while chanting a series of notations chalked on the blackboard: “Ta Ta Ti-Ti Ta.” Then she said, “Repeat.” Once we mastered the sequence, she lengthened it. Then she lengthened it again. Finally, the unit ended—or so I thought. In fact, the rhythm unit never ended. It was pretty much all we did in music that year.
    Our only breaks from this siege of syncopation came when Ms. Hannah brought out her guitar and sat on her desk with her legs crossed, revealing under her skirt a stack of silver ankle bracelets shaped like baby snakes, with ruby eyes. She produced the guitar without forewarning, apparently in response to strong emotions whose origins in her mysterious personal life were impossible for me to guess at but, to judge by the songs she chose, suggested deep gloom and disappointment. “I’ve looked at love from both sides now ,” she sang, “ From give and take, and still somehow / It’s love’s illusions I recall / I really don’t know love at all.” This was among her lighter numbers. Most of them were unsettling, even shocking. One song, from the movie Billy Jack , the story of a half-breed Indian who murdered people who threatened the environment, ended with the terrifying lyrics “ There won’t be any trumpets blowing Come the judgment day On the bloody morning after / One tin soldier rides away.” The song that spooked me most, though, was by the Beatles: “ wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door / All the lonely people / Where do they all come from?”
    From wherever Ms. Hannah dwelt, I came to feel, because in the weeks that followed Valentine’s Day, after the cupids came down in the classrooms and the rabbits and chicks went up, she sunk even further into her dim blue world. Her voice grew croaky, husky,