Then there was Mr. White: he was the teacher with the small patch of gray hair that sat on his head like the ash of a cigarette, the one who often looked like he’d just glimpsed his future in a single-sex nursing home. But worse, he was the teacher with the son in our class. OK, you can’t plan for happiness in life, but you can take certain precautions against unhappiness, can’t you? At the beginning of every class, Mr. White had to do roll call. He had to call out his own son’s name. Can you imagine anything more ridiculous? A father knows whether his own son is in the room or not, surely.

“White,” he’d say.

“Here,” Brett would answer. What a farce.

Poor Brett!

Poor Mr. White!

How could either of them stand it, to have to suppress their intimacy to the extent where one pretends daily not even to recognize the face of his own kin? And when Mr. White growled at the students for their stupidity, how did Brett feel to be mauled by his own father like that? Was it a game to them? Was it real? During Mr. White’s tirades, Brett’s face was too emotionless, too frozen- I’d say he knew as well as we did that his father was a petty tyrant who treated us students as though we had deprived him of his vital years and, as revenge, predicted our future failings, then failed us to prove himself prophetic. Yes, Mr. White, you were unquestionably my favorite teacher. Your awfulness was the most comprehensible to me. You were the one visibly raging in pain, and shamelessly you did it in front of your own child.

He handed me back my Hamlet essay with a livid face. He actually gave me a mighty zero. With my essay, I’d made a joke of something that was sacred to him: William Shakespeare. Deep down, I knew that Hamlet was an extraordinary work, but when I’m ordered to complete a task, I find myself straining dumbly at the leash. Writing garbage was the form of my petty rebellion.

That night I made the mistake of showing the essay to my father. He read it squinting, grunting, nodding- basically, as if he were lifting heavy timber. I stood beside him, waiting for approval, I suppose. I didn’t get it. He handed it back to me and said, “I read something interesting today in Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary. Did you know before the Egyptians embalmed their pharaoh, they took his brain out? Yet they expected him to reemerge later on down the centuries. What do you think they imagined he’d do there, without his brain?”

It had been a long time since my father had tried to educate me himself. To make up for abandoning me to a system he had nothing but contempt for, Dad routinely dumped piles of books in my room with little Post-it notes (“Read this!” or “This man is a motherfucking god!”) pasted onto the covers: Plato, Nietzsche, Cioran, Lawrence, Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Novalis, Epictetus, Berkeley, Kant, Popper, Sartre, Rousseau, and so on. He seemed especially to favor any writer who was a pessimist, a nihilist, or a cynic, including Céline, Bernhard, and the ultimate pessimist-poet, James Thomson, with his darkly frightening “The City of Dreadful Night.”

“Where are the women?” I asked Dad. “Didn’t they think anything worth writing down?”

The next night I found Virginia Woolf, George Sand, Ayn Rand, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, Mary McCarthy, Margaret Mead, Hannah Arendt, and Susan Sontag waiting on my pillow.

In this way I was not self-educated so much as I was force-fed, and in truth I liked them all well enough. The Greeks, for example, had fine ideas about how to run a society that are still valid today, especially if you think slavery is wonderful. As for the rest of them, all unquestionable geniuses, I have to admit that their enthusiasm for and celebration of one kind of human being (themselves) and their fear and revulsion of the other kind (everyone else) grated on my nerves. It’s not just that they petitioned for the halting of universal education lest it “ruin thinking,” or that they did everything they could to make their art unintelligible to most people, but they always said unfriendly things like “Three cheers for the inventors of poison gas!” (D. H. Lawrence) and “If we desire a certain type of civilization and culture, we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it” (G. B. Shaw) and “Sooner or later we must limit the families of the unintelligent classes” (Yeats) and “The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men” (Nietzsche). Everyone else or, in other words, everyone I knew was nothing more than a corpse rotting upright mainly because of his preference for watching football over reading Virgil. “Mass entertainment is the death of civilization,” those highbrows spat, but I say, if a man giggles at something puerile and his body glows from the joy, does it matter that it was caused not by a profound artwork but by a rerun of Bewitched? Honestly, who cares? That man just had a wonderful inner moment, and what’s more, he got it cheap. Good for him, you ponderous fuck! Basically they thought it would be lovely if the dehumanized masses, who made them literally sick, would please either pass into history or become slaves and be quick about it. They wanted to create a race of superbeings based on their own snobby, syphilitic selves, men who sit on mountaintops all day licking their inner god into a frenzy. Personally I think it wasn’t the “plebeian desire for happiness” of the masses they hated so much, but the secret, sour acknowledgment that the plebes sometimes found it.

That’s why, just as my father had abandoned me, I’d abandoned his learned friends, all those wonderful, bitter geniuses, and at school I’d settled in comfortably doing the bare minimum. Often I’d give myself the day off and walk around the throbbing city to watch it throb or to the racetrack to watch the horses eke out their unfortunate existence under the arses of small men. Occasionally the administration would send grave, unintentionally humorous letters to my father about my attendance.

“Got another letter,” Dad would say, waving it in the air like a $10 note he’d found in an old pair of pants.

“And?”

“And what do you have to say for yourself?”

“Five days a week is too much. It’s draining.”

“You don’t have to be the first in the state, you know. Just scrape by. That’s what you should be aiming for.”

“Well, that’s what I’m doing. I’m scraping.”

“Great. Just make sure you turn up enough to get the little sliver of paper with your name on it.”

“What the hell for?”

“I told you a thousand times. You need society to think you’re playing along. You do what you like later, but you need to make them think you’re one of them.”

“Maybe I am one of them.”

“Yeah, and I’m going to the office tomorrow morning at seven.”

But he wasn’t always able to leave it alone. In fact, I had achieved a certain notoriety among the faculty because of the universally dreaded and personally mortifying visits of my father, whose face would appear suddenly pressed against the frosted glass of the classroom door.

The day after I showed my father my Hamlet essay, he came into my English class and took a seat in the back, squeezing himself into a wooden chair. Mr. White had been writing the word “intertextualization” on the blackboard when Dad came in, so when he turned back to us and saw a middle-aged man among all of us fresh-faced dopes, he was confused. He glowered at my father disapprovingly, as if getting ready to chastise one of his students for spontaneously aging in the middle of a lesson.

“Bit sluggish in here, isn’t it?” Dad said.

“Pardon me?”

“I said, it’s a bit difficult to think in here, isn’t it?”

“I’m sorry, you are…”

“A concerned parent.”

“You are a parent of a student in this class?”