Jeb Strikes (Out) Again
Maury knows whats up. Now let's dance!
Noyes: "Does this mustache make my ears look weird?"
Story Date: 1994
Another Story about Jeb, the man-child who believed his girlfriend could masturbate by twirling her ankle. Four years before that blow-up, Jeb was a saucy eighth grader navigating the turbulent storms of puberty.
It is a natural part of growing up that we learn and accept that there are a finite number of things we excel at. We must all acquiesce to logic and accept that we are the absolute best at nothing. A humbling but difficult truism. Jeb, however, as a burgeoning narcissist, steadfastly clung to the notion that he was the smartest human being on the planet, and wasn't afraid to let you know (Spoiler alert: Jeb is not).
At some point that school year, Jeb claimed to have a photographic memory. This is a typical bullshit thing middle school kids say, and it's not the sort of thing that goes unchallenged. Using a variety of highly scientific tests, I and the other children of Northwoods Park Middle School determined this claim to be false.
Now, Jeb was a rich tapestry of more pressing issues, so his claims of eidetic recall were all but forgotten until eighth grade english, where our teacher (the best educator a 1994 average North Carolina teacher’s salary of $20,575 could buy) decided to run out the semester by having us memorize and recite a series of increasingly lengthy poems. She was firmly ascribed to the belief that rote memorization was the best way to shape our young minds, while simultaneously instilling a lasting appreciation for poetic prose. Actually, I think it was just her way of paying us back for being annoying little shits all semester.
Our crowning achievement was to be the 1906 classic The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes*. Seventeen verses and eighty-five lines. Practically [i]The Iliad[/i].
The plan was for us to memorize the piece in its entirety over a month or so. Then, in what was undoubtedly the best use of classroom time, we were to proceed to the front of the class one by one and recite that motherfucker until all thirty kids had their chance to experience their first dose of performance anxiety.
Grading was based on a straightforward system: everyone got fifteen points for standing up. Were one to get stuck, we were allowed to ask for a line that would be provided by the teacher, but at the cost of a point per line.
Ignoring the more asinine logistical aspects of the assignment - listening to a platoon of peripubescents stagger through a labyrinth of prose would have a gun in my mouth - the whole thing looked to be a rather ho-hum affair until Jeb’s megalomaniacal personality thrust itself to the fore.
It began when someone remembered Jeb’s now-debunked claims of having a photographic memory. While no one enjoys being reminded of some old bullshit they said, Jeb didn’t do well with being called out; instead of shutting the fuck up or laughing it off, Jeb doubled down. We didn’t understand what he was truly capable of, he argued. Jeb then claimed his brain was so powerful that it could absorb a near-infinite amount of information. He likened his memory to a sponge that could be filled and emptied at will. This, he claimed, allowed him to effortlessly manage the accumulate/discharge/forget knowledge cycle that the rest of us toiled under. Unstated but implied message: I am still the smartest man alive. (I want to say Jeb also threw in a bullshit story about being tested by scientists, something about electrodes being attached to his head. Unfortunately, I am less brilliant, so this may have been some other kid running his gums)
A demonstration of this Total Recall ability was demanded, and Jeb accepted with a pledge: he would memorize the new poem in the classroom, moments before going up and reciting it perfectly. Hands were shaken and bets that would never be paid were made. It was on.
I’d wager a number of you are thinking that Jeb was playing the game where he secretly memorizes the poem in advance and then, on game day, he’d make a show of quickly memorizing the lines. The magic trick route. Not so. Jeb appeared to genuinely believe his ridiculous claims of mental prowess. With the irrational confidence that only fools seem capable of generating, Jeb sat idly and watched as the date of the performance approached.
Recitations were split over two days. Jeb’s fell on the second. The first group did reasonably well, but they were far from perfect - there were normal flubs, and a few major catastrophes resulting from unpreparedness and stage fright. I mention this for two reasons: first, to emphasize that Jeb heard the poem recited in its entirety at least twenty times before his turn arrived - there had to be some passive memorization happening. Adding to this, Jeb got a firsthand look at how hard it was to memorize something. He saw smart people who'd prepared in advance genuinely struggle.
None of this put the fear of failure (or public embarrassment into Jeb). Day two arrived. I took my turn and plowed through well enough. Others weren't so lucky; the biggest train wreck came immediately before Jeb's turn: a kid had short-circuited midway through and looped back to the beginning and, helpless, repeated the poem… and then did it again! When they hit the same spot, the teacher took mercy on them and provided a (hopefully) “free” cue to let her move on.
Flushed and exhausted, the double coda girl finally finished and sat down, visibly relieved to be done. Jeb was up. As promised, he appeared to be doing a good ol’ fashioned cram. For the last ten minutes, he’d had the textbook open to the poem. His eyes darted back and forth, rapidly scanning lines of text. As his name was called, Jeb rose, still reading from the book as he walked, slow as a priest sauntering to the altar, to the makeshift podium in front of the class.
“You may begin,” the teacher said.
“OK,” Jeb nodded. He lowered the book to his waist and dramatically closed his eyes and inhaled, assuming the position of someone in a light trance. “The wind was a torrent of-”
“Book closed,” our teacher broke in, putting into words what everyone saw: Jeb’s “closed” eyes had been cast down at his textbook, which was only halfway shut.
Magic tricks don’t work if the audience won’t suspend disbelief.
Wordlessly, Jeb closed the book with obvious reluctance, his eyes desperately scouring the ink within until the pages softly snapped shut. Jeb faced us, armed with only his self-proclaimed sponge-like memory. He began:
“The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees.
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.
The moon… the… hmmm.”
For a good fifteen to twenty seconds, Jeb stared wordlessly into space. The line he was searching for wasn’t there.
“Do you need a line?” our teacher finally asked.
Jeb winced like someone attempting a difficult bowel movement before finally nodding.
“The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor.”
Jeb nodded. He knew the refrain (because he'd heard it roughly four hundred times the last two days). “And the highwayman came riding - riding - riding. The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn door.”
Nice. He was back on track. Just wring the last 80 lines out of that mental sponge and let’s go to gym class.
Twenty-five years later, I still remember that the next verse described the Highwayman's sexy wardrobe (he was on a booty call in the poem; early on, one unfortunate classmate had publicly discovered the difference in both pronunciation and meaning of ‘rapier’ and ‘raper’). Jeb, however, drew a blank. He furrowed his brow, his gaze returning to some undefined spot above our heads.
Twenty seconds passed in silence. Twenty fucking seconds, people.
“Do you need another line?” the teacher asked tiredly. Jeb waited a full ten seconds before acknowledging that, yes, he hadn’t a clue what comes next.
He received the next line, considered the words, then repeated it the same way a man takes a running start before a big leap. Only each time he tried to take flight, Jeb found himself mercilessly tethered to the ground. His eyes bugged out as he tried to force the poetry from his body by sheer force of will.
It was to no avail. Again and again, the pattern repeated. A new cue, then a lengthy pause, searching looks, and another prompting. I want to be crystal clear here: Jeb wasn't doing three or four lines on his own, then getting a helpful prod. He was contributing nothing. The poem was literally being read - at a snail's pace - by our increasingly disgusted teacher.
It was excruciating just to watch. As the delays mounted, I saw classmates mouthing the next line, a few in a pitying attempt to help, some in exasperation and more still simply because the poem had been hammered into the fiber of their being.
As time crept by, my incredulity (and, if we’re being honest, a little schadenfreude) gave way to a certain perverse curiosity. It was abundantly clear that Jeb was dead in the water. He couldn’t have produced another line if Aphrodite flew in and offered him a handy in exchange for the next doublet. In this situation, any normal person would have simply admitted that they didn’t know the poem, take the zero and sit their ass down. This is especially true for insecure fourteen-year-olds. It was baffling - why was Jeb delaying the inevitable?
As the trainwreck progressed into ridiculousness, it finally dawned on me what Jeb was trying to accomplish. The spot in space he kept staring at between lines? It was the clock on the back wall. With his idiot mental powers coming up kaput and his cheating plan exposed, Jeb was deliberately slow-playing things, humiliating himself in hopes of reaching the class change so he could escape and, under the rules of the road, try again tomorrow with a more conventional approach.
With forty minutes gone in the period, the plan had a chance. One has to give Jeb some credit; what the guy lacked in humility and perspicacity, he made up for with a sort of animalistic cunning. It wasn’t brilliant, per se, but it was something.
Unfortunately, it is very difficult to bullshit a weathered public school educator. Right around Jeb's twentieth straight failure to recite new material, our teacher finally realized that he was milking the clock. She sighed heavily, equal parts annoyance and fatigue. “You clearly haven’t memorized the poem,” she said. “Have a seat. And a zero.”
“I get fifteen points for standing up, right?” Jeb asked.
“You get nothing,” the teacher said. “Now sit down.”
The bell to change classes sounded. “I have rights,” Jeb protested. “I wasn’t done!”
“You had the right to remain silent,” the teacher said. “And you took it.” It was a good comeback, so good she ruined it by laughing at her own cleverness.
Jed stood alone as the class bustled out. It is unclear whether he learned anything from this disaster, but I heard he ultimately took nine years to finish college, so his "delay" strategy may have stuck around for a while.
In memory of Jeb's ignominious performance, I have modified a familiar sonnet in his honor:
My name is Jeb, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
*I scoured the internet, searching for some interesting morsel to add about Noyes. There was nothing.
Another Story about Jeb, the man-child who believed his girlfriend could masturbate by twirling her ankle. Four years before that blow-up, Jeb was a saucy eighth grader navigating the turbulent storms of puberty.
It is a natural part of growing up that we learn and accept that there are a finite number of things we excel at. We must all acquiesce to logic and accept that we are the absolute best at nothing. A humbling but difficult truism. Jeb, however, as a burgeoning narcissist, steadfastly clung to the notion that he was the smartest human being on the planet, and wasn't afraid to let you know (Spoiler alert: Jeb is not).
At some point that school year, Jeb claimed to have a photographic memory. This is a typical bullshit thing middle school kids say, and it's not the sort of thing that goes unchallenged. Using a variety of highly scientific tests, I and the other children of Northwoods Park Middle School determined this claim to be false.
Now, Jeb was a rich tapestry of more pressing issues, so his claims of eidetic recall were all but forgotten until eighth grade english, where our teacher (the best educator a 1994 average North Carolina teacher’s salary of $20,575 could buy) decided to run out the semester by having us memorize and recite a series of increasingly lengthy poems. She was firmly ascribed to the belief that rote memorization was the best way to shape our young minds, while simultaneously instilling a lasting appreciation for poetic prose. Actually, I think it was just her way of paying us back for being annoying little shits all semester.
Our crowning achievement was to be the 1906 classic The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes*. Seventeen verses and eighty-five lines. Practically [i]The Iliad[/i].
The plan was for us to memorize the piece in its entirety over a month or so. Then, in what was undoubtedly the best use of classroom time, we were to proceed to the front of the class one by one and recite that motherfucker until all thirty kids had their chance to experience their first dose of performance anxiety.
Grading was based on a straightforward system: everyone got fifteen points for standing up. Were one to get stuck, we were allowed to ask for a line that would be provided by the teacher, but at the cost of a point per line.
Ignoring the more asinine logistical aspects of the assignment - listening to a platoon of peripubescents stagger through a labyrinth of prose would have a gun in my mouth - the whole thing looked to be a rather ho-hum affair until Jeb’s megalomaniacal personality thrust itself to the fore.
It began when someone remembered Jeb’s now-debunked claims of having a photographic memory. While no one enjoys being reminded of some old bullshit they said, Jeb didn’t do well with being called out; instead of shutting the fuck up or laughing it off, Jeb doubled down. We didn’t understand what he was truly capable of, he argued. Jeb then claimed his brain was so powerful that it could absorb a near-infinite amount of information. He likened his memory to a sponge that could be filled and emptied at will. This, he claimed, allowed him to effortlessly manage the accumulate/discharge/forget knowledge cycle that the rest of us toiled under. Unstated but implied message: I am still the smartest man alive. (I want to say Jeb also threw in a bullshit story about being tested by scientists, something about electrodes being attached to his head. Unfortunately, I am less brilliant, so this may have been some other kid running his gums)
A demonstration of this Total Recall ability was demanded, and Jeb accepted with a pledge: he would memorize the new poem in the classroom, moments before going up and reciting it perfectly. Hands were shaken and bets that would never be paid were made. It was on.
I’d wager a number of you are thinking that Jeb was playing the game where he secretly memorizes the poem in advance and then, on game day, he’d make a show of quickly memorizing the lines. The magic trick route. Not so. Jeb appeared to genuinely believe his ridiculous claims of mental prowess. With the irrational confidence that only fools seem capable of generating, Jeb sat idly and watched as the date of the performance approached.
Recitations were split over two days. Jeb’s fell on the second. The first group did reasonably well, but they were far from perfect - there were normal flubs, and a few major catastrophes resulting from unpreparedness and stage fright. I mention this for two reasons: first, to emphasize that Jeb heard the poem recited in its entirety at least twenty times before his turn arrived - there had to be some passive memorization happening. Adding to this, Jeb got a firsthand look at how hard it was to memorize something. He saw smart people who'd prepared in advance genuinely struggle.
None of this put the fear of failure (or public embarrassment into Jeb). Day two arrived. I took my turn and plowed through well enough. Others weren't so lucky; the biggest train wreck came immediately before Jeb's turn: a kid had short-circuited midway through and looped back to the beginning and, helpless, repeated the poem… and then did it again! When they hit the same spot, the teacher took mercy on them and provided a (hopefully) “free” cue to let her move on.
Flushed and exhausted, the double coda girl finally finished and sat down, visibly relieved to be done. Jeb was up. As promised, he appeared to be doing a good ol’ fashioned cram. For the last ten minutes, he’d had the textbook open to the poem. His eyes darted back and forth, rapidly scanning lines of text. As his name was called, Jeb rose, still reading from the book as he walked, slow as a priest sauntering to the altar, to the makeshift podium in front of the class.
“You may begin,” the teacher said.
“OK,” Jeb nodded. He lowered the book to his waist and dramatically closed his eyes and inhaled, assuming the position of someone in a light trance. “The wind was a torrent of-”
“Book closed,” our teacher broke in, putting into words what everyone saw: Jeb’s “closed” eyes had been cast down at his textbook, which was only halfway shut.
Magic tricks don’t work if the audience won’t suspend disbelief.
Wordlessly, Jeb closed the book with obvious reluctance, his eyes desperately scouring the ink within until the pages softly snapped shut. Jeb faced us, armed with only his self-proclaimed sponge-like memory. He began:
“The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees.
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.
The moon… the… hmmm.”
For a good fifteen to twenty seconds, Jeb stared wordlessly into space. The line he was searching for wasn’t there.
“Do you need a line?” our teacher finally asked.
Jeb winced like someone attempting a difficult bowel movement before finally nodding.
“The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor.”
Jeb nodded. He knew the refrain (because he'd heard it roughly four hundred times the last two days). “And the highwayman came riding - riding - riding. The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn door.”
Nice. He was back on track. Just wring the last 80 lines out of that mental sponge and let’s go to gym class.
Twenty-five years later, I still remember that the next verse described the Highwayman's sexy wardrobe (he was on a booty call in the poem; early on, one unfortunate classmate had publicly discovered the difference in both pronunciation and meaning of ‘rapier’ and ‘raper’). Jeb, however, drew a blank. He furrowed his brow, his gaze returning to some undefined spot above our heads.
Twenty seconds passed in silence. Twenty fucking seconds, people.
“Do you need another line?” the teacher asked tiredly. Jeb waited a full ten seconds before acknowledging that, yes, he hadn’t a clue what comes next.
He received the next line, considered the words, then repeated it the same way a man takes a running start before a big leap. Only each time he tried to take flight, Jeb found himself mercilessly tethered to the ground. His eyes bugged out as he tried to force the poetry from his body by sheer force of will.
It was to no avail. Again and again, the pattern repeated. A new cue, then a lengthy pause, searching looks, and another prompting. I want to be crystal clear here: Jeb wasn't doing three or four lines on his own, then getting a helpful prod. He was contributing nothing. The poem was literally being read - at a snail's pace - by our increasingly disgusted teacher.
It was excruciating just to watch. As the delays mounted, I saw classmates mouthing the next line, a few in a pitying attempt to help, some in exasperation and more still simply because the poem had been hammered into the fiber of their being.
As time crept by, my incredulity (and, if we’re being honest, a little schadenfreude) gave way to a certain perverse curiosity. It was abundantly clear that Jeb was dead in the water. He couldn’t have produced another line if Aphrodite flew in and offered him a handy in exchange for the next doublet. In this situation, any normal person would have simply admitted that they didn’t know the poem, take the zero and sit their ass down. This is especially true for insecure fourteen-year-olds. It was baffling - why was Jeb delaying the inevitable?
As the trainwreck progressed into ridiculousness, it finally dawned on me what Jeb was trying to accomplish. The spot in space he kept staring at between lines? It was the clock on the back wall. With his idiot mental powers coming up kaput and his cheating plan exposed, Jeb was deliberately slow-playing things, humiliating himself in hopes of reaching the class change so he could escape and, under the rules of the road, try again tomorrow with a more conventional approach.
With forty minutes gone in the period, the plan had a chance. One has to give Jeb some credit; what the guy lacked in humility and perspicacity, he made up for with a sort of animalistic cunning. It wasn’t brilliant, per se, but it was something.
Unfortunately, it is very difficult to bullshit a weathered public school educator. Right around Jeb's twentieth straight failure to recite new material, our teacher finally realized that he was milking the clock. She sighed heavily, equal parts annoyance and fatigue. “You clearly haven’t memorized the poem,” she said. “Have a seat. And a zero.”
“I get fifteen points for standing up, right?” Jeb asked.
“You get nothing,” the teacher said. “Now sit down.”
The bell to change classes sounded. “I have rights,” Jeb protested. “I wasn’t done!”
“You had the right to remain silent,” the teacher said. “And you took it.” It was a good comeback, so good she ruined it by laughing at her own cleverness.
Jed stood alone as the class bustled out. It is unclear whether he learned anything from this disaster, but I heard he ultimately took nine years to finish college, so his "delay" strategy may have stuck around for a while.
In memory of Jeb's ignominious performance, I have modified a familiar sonnet in his honor:
My name is Jeb, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
*I scoured the internet, searching for some interesting morsel to add about Noyes. There was nothing.