"Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor." - Truman Capote
Why is that whenever we achieve anything worth celebrating in life we always give credit to the people who lifted us up, who supported us in our ‘darkest hours’, but we never give credit to the people who tried to hold us down--- the legion of critics and doubters, disrespecters, overlookers, even underminers? Have you ever wondered where you would be without school bullies, neighborhood menaces, bitter guidance counselors, irascible coaches, sideline hecklers, and condescending bosses--- even people you thought were your friends. The colleges that didn’t let you in. The job that didn’t hire you. The unrequited love interest. The whole list of bastards who said you wouldn’t or couldn’t make it?
Honestly, when have you ever heard someone accept an award and say, ‘I would like to thank my high school english teacher Mr. Dreamcrusher for telling me I would never amount to anything in life.’
Doesn’t Mr. Dreamcrusher deserve some credit? Haven’t he and his whole ornery ilk been driving people to overachieve for thousands of years?! And what credit do they get? What day has been established in their honor? Without the pain of their malevolence to drive us where would some of us even be? I found myself stewing on this very question last week after my old school called to extend an invitation to speak there in the fall.
Perhaps some background is in order here.
After sixth grade I went to a Quaker day school for six years. Just getting in was a big deal. Before I even applied my buddy Mark, who was two years ahead of me and already a student at Sidwell, warned me not to get my hopes up. We were standing at the ice cream truck at the time, waiting for our Frogger ice cream bars when he put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘It’s really hard to get in Dax. You have to be really smart.’
It turned out that ‘getting in’ was the easy part. The hard part was discovering I was a complete idiot, or so it seemed at the time. First, I was placed in a remedial math class with, incidentally, the other black kids who’d been admitted that year. It was designed to help us catch-up to the other students. All I remember from that class was my buddy Harry Cooke (who, as the first Jehovah Witness I met didn’t celebrate his birthday which fell four days before mine, on Valentine’s Day no less-- another holiday he couldn’t participate in-- arrived late to eighth grade graduation wearing an all white polyester suit with a red tie) wondering what the fuck we were doing there. The next year, after earning a solid B in the class, my Algebra teacher, Ms. Lawsky, recommended that I repeat the course in the ninth grade. I wound up spending the summer studying for a placement test with a tutor who after giving me a pre-test on the first day also asked, what the fuck I was doing there.
High school was filled with even more horrors. In ninth grade I got the highest score in the grade on the first Algebra II test of the year. Somehow word spread and students I had never spoken to before were approaching in utter disbelief. They were certain that I had cheated. In eleventh grade my Physics teacher, Mr. Mog, whom I swear to this day is the real life Mr. Magoo, refused to promote me to Bio I. All students wishing to take the course had to receive permission from their Physics teacher. I figured I was a shoe-in. Admittedly, I had tapered off in the waning months of the school year, but, again I had a solid B in the course and I knew other students who he had given permission to with similar grades.
‘I just don’t think you’re ready for this,’ Mr. Mog said to me in his office. It was crushing.
None of these individual episodes come close to topping my entire high school English career. I began in earnest. I studied, prepared, spent Saturday afternoons at my father’s office typing papers on Beowulf and Macbeth on his Eagle II computer. When I was finished writing my father corrected my misspellings and edited my grammar. By Monday morning I was convinced that the work I produced was A material. Without fail, though, my papers came back to me slathered in red-ink, and usually ungraded. ‘See Me’ was the mark I remember best from ninth grade English. I became rather adept at folding then stuffing my returned tests and papers into my binder in a single, seamless motion. Then, while the other students stood around their lockers comparing grades, I slipped off to a quiet bathroom stall in the boys’ locker room. Only when I was in the confines of the bathroom did I reach inside the binder and assess the damage. Finally, after practically writing one of my papers for me, my sister Leslie, easily infuriated as she was and tired of seeing her baby brother teary-eyed, stormed into the building after school one afternoon and lit into Mr. Bergmann’s izz-ass!
Still, I was embarrassed, ashamed. For the next three years I became the ultimate classroom casualty: a bright kid who would rather settle for mediocrity than risk further humiliation.I Joked about my averageness. Bragged about buying the Cliff Notes version of practically every book that was assigned. I got to my classes early for the sole purpose of securing a space near the back or in the corner, whichever kept me out of my teacher’s purview. I avoided seminar classes because they generally required everyone to sit around a table. Throughout the rest of high school my teachers and I ostensibly agreed to accept that my perfectly unspectacular grades were a function of my limited brain power, my lack of focus, and my preoccupation with basketball. Prejudice never even came up. Never entered the conversation. Sidwell was a progressive school. There was a sprinkling of chocolate in every grade. The security staff was black. The buildings and grounds crew was black.. The basketball coach was black. I presumed that since my father was breaking his neck to pay the $10,000 a year tuition (now 20K!), that my teachers were racist-proof. They were too intelligent to be bigots. In retrospect, I’m sure they felt the same way about themselves.
It wasn’t until I got to college and brought home 3.6 GPA my first semester that I discovered that I could actually conjugate a verb properly. Suddenly, my papers weren’t all read ink anymore. There were even sentences with a little check mark beside them, paragraphs with the words ‘good point’ penciled in the margins. One T/A even cautioned me about a pro-Communist paper I had written in my Nature of Politics class. After handing it back he said that the only reason he’d given me an A- and not an A was because he didn’t want to raise suspicions with his superiors. He was already a noted pot-head communist sympathizer himself. Finally, Dick Wasson, an aging diabetic professor who forewarned us to feed him chocolate if he started to ramble incoherently in the middle of his lectures, grabbed me before class one day and said, ‘You are a writer, Dax-Devlon Ross.’
That wasn’t exactly what he said. But it’s close enough. All that matters is that it was enough. By then it had been so long since I had gotten any meaningful academic encouragement that this single, simple gesture from an undistinguished professor on the verge of both retirement and senility set me off on a decade long quest to prove my high school teachers wrong. I didn’t want simple revenge, however. Revenge would’ve merely meant getting even. Going back to the school and telling each of my teachers that they had failed me miserably face to face would’ve certainly sufficed if it was revenge I was after. They would’ve tasted my years of academic anxiety. Apologized. Felt bad. But, really, I didn’t want their pity or their guilt.1 I wanted something deeper, more lasting--- the only thing that could make up for six years of ego deflation: I wanted their respect.
When I got the call from the old school asking me to come back and share some of my experiences as a writer only one thing came to mind. Dave Chapelle. Why Dave you ask? Well, after waiting more than a year, I had just seen the first of the ‘lost’ Chapelle’s Show episodes the night before. One of the sketches followed Dave as he exacted revenge on the people who had overlooked, doubted and dissed him before his fifty-five million dollar ship came in. He tricked an ex-girlfriend into leaving her husband, promised to ruin a talent agent’s career and burned down a comedy club just before pushing its disabled owner down a stairway after the man apologized. As hilarious as the sketch was, as brilliantly as it brought about a sense of catharsis, watching it I wondered if in addition to feeling stressed out by the show, Dave hadn’t been an outsider for so long that unqualified commercial and artistic success and critical praise hadn’t robbed him of his underdog status. After doing some research I discovered that Dave reportedly told Comedy Central president Doug Herzog over dinner that he "wanted to be wrong again sometimes, instead of always being right." In other words-or in my words- Dave missed the criticism. In some sense, the criticism had fueled him, even shaped part of his creative identity. He had managed to turn the negative experiences he had in the business into something useful to his art. It’s a common enough story: rogue outsider artist blows up and loses his edge because no one around him has the balls to tell him his shit stinks. The same thing arguably happened to Eminem, minus the public meltdown. He based his career on his rebellion against a society that didn’t accept him. Then, suddenly, people from all walks of life embraced him. Since his popularity peaked with the Academy Award winning song Lose Yourself in 2003, he’s been quiet. Rather than become a parody of himself, he wisely chose to quietly remove himself from the public eye while he was still on top, something more rappers should consider doing.
Perhaps the classic underdog story belongs to Michael Jordan himself. Those of us who grew up watching the Come Fly With Me videos know the story well: His Airness gets cut from the varsity basketball team his sophomore year in high school. He’s forced to play junior varsity, which as a sophomore usually means you’ve got no future on the hardwood. MJ grows a four inches over the next year and becomes a star by his senior year. He goes on to North Carolina where he grows three more inches and becomes the National Player of the Year by his junior year. In the NBA he’s criticized for not being a good defender. He winds up being named Defensive Player of the Year. He’s criticized for not being a good shooter. He takes a thousand jumpers a day in the off-season and sure enough he can shoot the jumper. He’s criticized for not being able to win championships. He wins three in a row. Then he quits. Needs a new challenge: baseball. He sucks. Comes back to the NBA and nobody thinks he’ll be able to play at the same level again...but he does.
Simply put, without doubters there is no international phenomenon known as Michael Jordan. He is a prime, and albeit extreme, example of someone fueled by the naysayers. So how come we don’t know the name of the coach who cut MJ from his high school squad? Why is it that he isn’t mentioned in the same breathe as Dean Smith and Phil Jackson when people discuss the coaching influences he had over the years?
Consider the Peanuts comic strip. Without Lucy to thwart his earnest efforts, do we still sympathize with Charlie Brown? Consider the Superman franchise. Without Lex Luther to come up with fiendishly outlandish plans for world domination, is Superman even worth paying attention to? Does anybody watch a show like American Idol if the Simon Cowell character isn’t there to poo-poo the contestants we find endearing? We depend on our doubters, foils, critics and general haters. We rely on their overbearing voices of dissent. The pessimist as much as the optimist is the backbone of an achievement oriented society.
For a number of reasons I rarely read the paper these days but last week there was an article in The Times about William Ford, the CEO and Chairman of Ford Motor Company. In the last six years the company has lost seven percent of its market share here in America. Under his leadership the company’s global market share has declined as well. There are rumblings of doubt from possible heirs to the throne within the family. Mr. Ford defense is that since taking over the company his plans have been repeatedly frustrated by management. At one time characterized as a "reluctant executive who would rather be practicing yoga, fly fishing or traveling...", Mr. Ford now fashions himself the ultimate executive and claims to be "energized in a way that he was not during his first years as chief executive." But even as he works desperately to save his family’s company from financial ruin, one has to wonder if when he (assuming he in fact does) turns the company around he’ll give his critics their just desserts.
The funny thing is that despite all of my reflection on the invitation going back to my alma mater might not even be up to me. See, once they made their offer, I made mine. I wasn’t coming back for free. I think they were surprised that I wanted to get paid, though I always wonder why people assume I’m so hard up for work that I’ll take anything I can get. I mean, would you ask a computer technician to fix your computers for nothing? Alumni or not, I’ll be damned if I’m standing on anybody’s stage for forty-five minutes as a favor. The school certainly didn’t do my dad any favors when the tuition bill came every year.
Anyway, I haven’t heard from them school since last week. Perhaps I scared them off. Perhaps they don’t think I’m worth the money (though considering how modest my fee is I would hope that’s not the case). Either way I wouldn’t be surprised. Or disappointed. Maybe it’s still too early in my career to let go of that past hurt, too soon to make amends. After all, judging by my book sales and abbreviated writing portfolio, I just might need all the axes I have to grind at my disposal in order to keep myself motivated. In fact, this would just be one more to add the list.
