After going to school in Spain for a year, Phillips Andover Academy (yes, as in Bush I and II--Bush I was my interview!) offered me a single-year senior year there along with what they assured me were all the benefits of a diploma from their "prestigious" school. Since I was very unhappy with the school I left from when I went to Spain, and had no idea what a prep school involved, I said, sure. How bad could one year be?
Pretty bad, as it turned out. I have NEVER felt so out of place in my life. If I hadn't been able to acquire some temporary black ancestry, I would have lost it among that crowd. Andover had just started to grant a few places to some black guys to show how "modern" they had become. Those ghetto guys and I had little in common, them being mostly inner-city guys and me a white southerner, but after meeting the Park Avenue/Greenwich, CT crowd, I would only sit with the Ghetto guys at meals. Since they hated the preppies, too, they adopted me and were sure I had some black blood back in there somewhere. Who was I to argue? After all, Pushkin did, too, right?
By the way, all that diploma did was cost my parents money. I got into a decent college, but probably no more decent than I would have gotten had I stayed in my old school. I did get my revenge, though. My younger brother was with us at graduation when we were suddenly all herded together for our class photo to immortalize us in the school archives. He tried to climb out of the crowd when I said to hell with it, just stay put and don't say anything. The school administrators never cared enough about us to be able to recognize a ringer, and the preppies never cared about guys like me to notice that there might be one more of us outsiders in the group than they thought. I leaked the info out months later, but the damage was done, and I'll bet the school still doesn't know which guy in the picture is the one who didn't belong there. I WAS fairly pleased to find out that the school administration was mildly upset about it.
But the vast majority of the guys in my class were clones of this Martin Shkeli. An uncaring, money-obsessed asshole who thinks the world owes him a living because he has a high IQ and no soul. Well, shit. I had 90% of the guys in my graduating class like that. He's not unique, just a little more mean and a little more smug in public than the others.
= new reply since forum marked as read
