Dread at midnight
I made a bedtime tea and stared
out my window. Stars twinkled. I was trying to measure
their light when the phone rang. It was Ferretti.
"I've been sleeping with
an encyclopedia under my pillow," he said. "When I get
up to pee,
I turn the page."
"I've boiled a Mensa newsletter," I said. "I'll sip the broth."
"Well," he said, "it's better than drinking their blood." Click.
I put down the phone, raised
the teacup and sipped. It tasted nasty. I didn't care. The tea
symbolized the elixir I had to bring back from the Mensa convention.
I'm tired of feeling dumb in
a petty way. I want to feel dumb in a grandiose way. I crave
pure genius consciousness. That's how I'm evolving. I want civilization
boiled down to its
cosmic source: God and/or Mu tea. It's what mature men contemplate.
Along with that
new potency pill.
Making us invisible
Ferretti's shirt was buttoned
akimbo. His socks didn't match. He'd trained hard by not
doing physical labor for weeks. It gave him what the spy manual
dictates is a
well-rounded look in Mensa circles: slumped shoulders and droopy
butt.
"You look good,"
I said, "but to be truly invisible to these people means
more than
imitation. They're too smart for that."
"Whaddya mean?" he asked.
"Reporters are intimidated
by Mensa," I said. "So they infiltrate with envy or
spite. They
think it's a secret weapon. But it triggers the usual alarms.
The best tact is no tact.
Remember what Einstein said: 'Imagination is more important.'"
Ferretti nodded. We drove to
the Mensa meeting in Warren. We felt comfortable amid the
factories, burger joints and TransAms revving at stoplights. We're
Downriver boys. We
believe in hockey moms. We believe in K-cars and VFW halls and
fish fries in the church
basement.
But it seemed peculiar that
Mensa would meet in Warren. It lacks the great moral riddles
that Detroit represents in terms of race. It lacks the great intellectual
stimulation of
Detroit's architecture. It ain't got no university. It ain't got
no art institute.
"Why Warren?" I asked.
"Ornithology," Ferretti said. "Birds of a feather."
Hell's doorstep
We passed through the front
doors of the Van Dyke Hotel and walked down a dark
corridor.
"This'll be the end of
us," Ferretti whispered. "These people have studied
all the acts.
Picasso and Braque. Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Beavis and Butt-head.
They're gonna
eat our livers. We're outta our league. We shoulda taken the demolition
derby
assignment."
I contemplated the potency
pill. There should be something a tired ol' butcher's son can
take 15 minutes before attending a Mensa convention to relieve
anxiety and boost
performance. To raise his IQ.
"Ferretti," I said,
"my barber recommends two aspirin and a Coca-Cola to get
a man
jump-started. Whaddya think?"
But it was too late. We were
met by a lofty blonde. The Queen Eagle of Mensa. She
escorted us to a cove where other Mensa-birds nested. All female.
All with blinding brass
auras. Ferretti and I trembled. A coupla brainless jokers brought
to the ace bosom of
Mensa. It tests one's nerve.
In the belly of the beast
It was a Cold War council assembled
in response to recent bad press. But it wasn't our
fault that a preceding journalist had written vindictively.
"We're innocent,"
Ferretti pleaded. "Przybylski's Dumb. I'm Dumber. We just
wanna hang
out while our girlfriends shop at the mall. Where's the hors d'oeuvres
table? The hot tub?"
The Queen Eagle smiled. We
were so scared we smiled back. We sat on a plush couch
and tried not to say, "Duh ... duh ... duh."
But, tragically, the only time
Ferretti and I don't stammer is when we're irrational. It's just
a
matter of crossing over into a more whimsical dimension.
"The tarot reading,"
I said. "I didn't expect that they'd have one at a Mensa
convention.
Take us there. Please."
"No," the Queen Eagle said. "It's private."
She introduced us to accountants
and engineers and physicists. All of them female. All of
whom had triumphed as rational thinkers with warrior will. They'd
been successful in their
lives' great gambit. It gave them a huge collective presence.
"How about the Sip and Savor?" I asked. "We can use a drink. Or maybe the hot tub?"
"No," the Queen Eagle
said. She had blonde hair. Blue eyes. Polished fingernails,
polished shoes and polished manners. A glorious shield. She used
it to keep Ferretti and
me at a distance, directing us to an academic presentation on
Great Lakes shipwrecks.
I stood in the auditorium and
pretended to be interested in maritime law while wondering
about the sex life of the speaker. Mr. Blue Tie and Khaki Pants.
Jurisdoctor. Ph.D.
Whatever.
We were directed to the silent
auction and the game room, where Mensa birds of every
feather did jigsaw puzzles, played Scrabble and chirped amicably.
We went to the Mensa Bowl,
where teams competed for points based on the difficulty of
the question.
How many children did George and Martha Washington have?
What's the most voluminous river in the world?
How many times does Rabelais mention flatulation in his 16th-century classic?
It was sorta fun. But it was
still awfully controlled. The Queen Eagle was always hovering,
as though Ferretti and I were Untermenschen. She must have feared
we'd contaminate
the Mensa corpus.
Maybe by impregnating the fräuleins.
Maybe by creating decadent art. She always
referred to our press badges when introducing us. They were our
Stars of David.
Nadir
We returned to the couch. We barely had strength to say, "Duh ... duh ... duh."
Yet we couldn't take the Queen
Eagle's tactics personally. Journalism dictated that we
consider her from a Mensa-bird's perspective. They liked her.
They'd elected her
president. She protected them.
But the better the Queen Eagle
looked, the worse we looked. Her all-around prowess
made us seem ratty. Ferretti is a bricklayer's son. My dad is
a butcher. Our lives' great
gambit has been to stay true to our macho working class while
developing brains that
give birth to stories. The city impregnates us with inspiration.
It gestates. It gets delivered
to an editor. It's a great gambit, in theory.
The problem is we're lousy at it.
And so it seemed our act would
end, revealed to Mensa as husks, depleted from years of
radically misspent labor.
The air conditioning was high.
The couch was plush. There were polite smiles all around.
But Ferretti and I were free falling through the floors of hell.
Retreat
We retreated to the parking lot.
"I'm gonna hire a personal
trainer," Ferretti said. "A blond-haired and blue-eyed
woman
with a drill instructor's temperament. I'd like to learn the times
tables. I can hear her
screaming, 'One more repetition!'"
"I used to want to be
a cop," I said. "To get into forbidden nooks and crannies
of the city.
And to test my ability to talk gently to volatile people. But
I'll tell ya that it also appealed to
me to have a badge under which to hide my demons. Now I wouldn't
mind a Mensa card
to pin on my chest."
"We're failures," Ferretti said. "Until we pass the test."
It was a joke. We didn't laugh.
We drove to Liberty Liquors. We bought a case of
Budweiser and a fifth of Jim Beam. We returned to Ferretti's loft
and taped a picture of
Einstein onto the television screen. We stared for hours in silence.
When the bottles were
empty, Ferretti raised a window that faced Michigan Avenue. He
leaned his head into the
elements and howled, "Imagination is more important."
Cards on the table
The next morning a clandestine
meeting was arranged, at the White Castle across from
the Van Dyke Hotel.
"I'm American Indian,"
the guy said while producing a tarot deck. "I've been a member
of
Mensa for years. They've become a second family. I've learned
to love everyone for who
they are. Even the fascists."
I shuffled the cards. The guy
talked about growing up as a tomato picker. He talked about
Indian warriors and chiefs and medicine men. He said the latter
often dressed like
women to summon opposite spirits.
I spoke of the great male powers
of will and rationality that the Queen Eagle possessed,
and the great female powers of creativity that writers like myself
try to cultivate. I spoke
freely. I rarely do. Because even educated people seize up. They
give me a pat on the
back and tell me that Shakespeare was bisexual.
But there was no stopping the
Mensa Mystic and myself. Knuckle-dragging Neanderthals
came into the White Castle, ordered piles of burgers and stuffed
them into their mouths.
They stared at us and the tarot cards suspiciously. But they left
us alone.
"Look at Robin Williams,"
I said. "He's been an alien. A drag queen. An ol' woman.
Yet he
always returns to his natural self. To visit those foreign places
is a very funny joke, and to
come back and live inside one's regular ol' skin is a very sad
joke. The genius is in the
rhythm. I'll tell ya what makes a writer: to have all of human
possibility alive in the
imagination and yet to be simultaneously slaved to a very strict
set of codes. It's the
mindfuck of champions."
The Mensa Mystic and I were
off on a warp. We talked about Carl Jung, Camille Paglia,
Joseph Campbell and Geronimo.
I didn't stutter once. I never
said, "Duh ... duh ... duh." I was drunk with the Mu
tea of
honesty. We blabbed like fools in God's never-ending moment.
I called Ferretti. He couldn't
believe I'd had a decent conversation with someone from
Mensa. He wanted to know what we talked about.
"A whole lot," I said, "of stupid stuff."
Special thanks to Southeast
Michigan Mensa, which held its 20th annual
convention at the beginning of May. Call 800-66-MENSA for info.