I'm With Valedictorian
I, Carlos Kotkin, Was Valedictorian of My High School
Here are but a few examples of my extraordinary intelligence.
* * *
I was a kid, about eight or nine, standing in the electronics department of some department store. Some store where they had a bunch of televisions for sale displayed along the wall and each television was tuned to a different station. I don’t know where my parents were, maybe they were buying a washing machine or a pretzel or something. I don’t know where they were, forget about them. The point is that I was standing at this wall of televisions and one particular television monitor caught my eye.
On one television monitor at this store, wherever I was, I noticed what looked like a live shot of a newsroom. It looked like the kind of shot where you see an anchorman say something like, “Is the mayonnaise in your refrigerator deadly? The answer at eleven,” and then Hart To Hart would start up again. Only there was no anchorman in the shot, and there wasn’t anybody in the background either. Just a bunch of cameras and desks and such, but no people. Except for one kid looking upward. It was the strangest thing. It looked like a technical error. It looked like for some reason, the news station had been evacuated and the only person left in the studio was this kid and the kid was looking up at something without expression. I got the impression someone would get fired over this, probably the president of the network. How could he or she let this happen? How could they disrupt their regular programming and allow a live shot of the anchorman’s son doing nothing, be on the air instead? And for so long!
I continued to watch this event unfold in fascination. I thought whoever this kid was, he was super lucky to be on tv. Boy, was he going to have a story to tell! I could already hear him telling all of his friends, “One time, my dad was working at the studio and there was a bomb threat so everybody had to get out of there. But nobody realized I was hiding under my dad’s news desk. Everyone was gone by the time I came out and I ended up being on live television because they forgot to turn the ‘live’ button off.”
As I imagined the attention this boy would soon be getting, I noticed something peculiar. I shifted my stance to the left, and the boy shifted his stance. I raised my arm and he raised his arm. Then suddenly it dawned on me. The kid on tv was me. I wasn’t looking at a live shot of a television studio, I was looking at myself standing in the electronics department of the store. One of the video cameras for sale was pointed directly at me, and the image I was looking at was the live feed from that camera. It only took me about five minutes to recognize myself.
* * *
The building where I live has a secured garage. When I drive out, I drive over a little cable and it makes the garage gate open. This happened for a few years, and then one day it stopped happening. I drove over it and nothing. The garage gate didn’t care, didn’t stir. I had to get out of the car and stomp on the cable with my foot in order to make the garage gate open. But it wasn’t as simple as it sounds. It was actually a little stressful. Because I would have to put the car in park, unbuckle my seatbelt, get out, stomp on the cable until the garage gate began to open, quickly climb back into my car (climb in because the driveway leading out of my garage is a steep incline and my car is at a weird angle), shut the car door, buckle my seat belt, shift the car back into drive and head out of the building before the garage gate closed again. The tension of having to go through this (every day) reminded me of Bruce Willis in Die Hard 2 when he is trapped in a cockpit filled with live grenades about to explode and he frantically straps himself into the pilot seat and hits the eject button just in time. That’s what it was like – for three weeks.
The one day… an epiphany. I have a garage clicker I keep in the left cup holder of my car. I was using it to open the garage gate whenever I returned home. Naturally, I assumed the clicker would only work as I was going inside the garage and not on the way out. That’s why I would go through the Bruce Willis Die Hard 2 routine whenever I was leaving. But one glorious day, as I was preparing to get out of my car and frantically stomp on the cable, I decided to press the clicker just out of curiosity. Lo and behold holy rocka hoya holy rocka who! the garage gate began to open. My garage clicker was – get this – multi-directional. At first, I thought my garage clicker was special or something. But after asking around, it turns out most garage clickers are multi-directional. They work just as good on the way out as they do on the way in. Whoever invented garage clickers, and made them multi-directional, is a genius.
* * *
In my late twenties, the toilet in my apartment wouldn’t flush. This was the first time in my life I had to deal with a broken toilet on my own. Yes, up to this point I had lived a charmed life. I had a plunger, realizing that one day, one terrible day, I might have to use it and thus, become a man. Inevitably, the day arrived. I gripped the plunger with confidence, masking my anxiety over using this tool for the first time. I placed it in the toilet bowl, pushed down, and… nothing. “Great,” I thought. “The plunger’s broken. Of course. The first time I need to use a plunger, and it’s broken. Thanks a lot, God.”
I stood over the toilet, wondering how exactly I was going to get out of this dilemma. I’d have to find a hardware store in the phone book, drive over there, and purchase a new, functioning plunger. Assuming of course they sold plungers in hardware stores. I wasn’t positive because I’d never been in a hardware store. Other than the time I worked at Sears Hardware as a teenager and lied to customers whenever they asked me about the tools, of which I knew nothing. I didn’t remember there being any plungers at Sears Hardware. Maybe.
Not wanting to bother driving anywhere, I decided I would ask my neighbor, Sheila, if I could borrow her plunger. That’s what neighbors are for, right? To borrow their plungers. Sheila was nice enough, the two or three times a year I would run into her in the elevator. She was in her fifties and I got the impression she had lived in the building for one hundred and twelve years. She seemed indifferent when she answered her door. I sheepishly told her my plunger wasn’t working and wondered if I could borrow hers. She appeared puzzled by this request. “Sure but… your plunger is broken? What’s wrong with it?”
I gave her the complete report. “It’s not working. I pressed down on it once and nothing happened.”
“Once?” She was quiet for a long time, giving me a funny look. “You’re supposed to press it down several times. Not just once.”
“Really? I hadn’t tried that. It’s my first time using a plunger. I’m going to try that. I’ll let you know what happens.” I thanked Sheila for her time, went back to my apartment and pushed down on the plunger several more times. Voila! Success. You’re supposed to push down on a plunger many times. I thanked Sheila for the tip when I saw her six months later in the elevator. Like the person who invented the multi-directional garage clicker, Sheila is a genius.
*
5.0 grade point average in high school.