Most Talented

In the eighth grade, in an effort to prepare us for high school as much as possible, we had class superlatives. In other words, a popularity contest. Like every fucking day of school since kindergarten hadn’t been a popularity contest already. Now we were expected to announce not only who was popular, but how they were popular.

The cute boy with blond hair and blue eyes was voted Most Popular and Most Likely To Succeed and Best Looking and Best Dressed. Pretty much anything that pointed to his golden, pink-cheekedness. And the prettiest girl whose family had the most money was right alongside him for everything. The tallest guy in class was voted Most Athletic because he played basketball.

I got voted Most Talented. People knew I wrote stories, and that was my early teens, so I was in my horror phase. I basically just wrote Stephen King fanfiction, because all I ever read were Stephen King novels. The funny thing about getting voted Most Talented was that few people had actually read anything I’d written. I didn’t share my stories with anyone but my best friend at the time. Maybe she told everyone in class to vote for me. I certainly didn’t. And, really, I can’t even remember when or how we voted. I just remember the idiotic photo they took of me and the girl who was also voted Most Talented. (Everything was very binary back then. There were talented boys and there were talented girls, and there could never be two girls who were more talented than the boys, or vice-versa. Everything had to be in balance that way. It was very old-fashioned.)

The girl’s name was Stacy and she got the award because she played piano. So, when they were taking our picture for the yearbook, they had us pose like we were playing the piano, which I thought was supremely misleading, because I couldn’t play a piano for shit. I was in our school’s concert band, but I played trombone, and that I did by ear. I couldn’t read music and I still can’t. But maybe they figured if I was in concert band and played an instrument, I was talented. And people value music more than writing anyway, I’ve noticed. Reading takes time and focus. Listening to music is more passive and easier for people.

Anyway. Most Talented in the eighth grade.

I kept writing throughout high school and kept all my writing even closer to my chest. I grew out of my horror, Stephen King fanfic phase and started trying to write more “serious” stuff. (Yes, I know horror can be serious and literary, but I was a punk ass kid in the 1980s and I hadn’t experienced a whole lot of the world. Cut me some slack.) I was in the band, marching band and concert band, again playing the trombone by ear. And in my senior year, I was again voted Most Talented.

This time the photograph was taken at some historic home there in my hometown and we had to dress nicely and fix our hair and smile. This time, I didn’t have to wonder why I’d been voted Most Talented, because the girl who shared the title with me was also in the band. Band=talented. Got it. Oh, and they treated us to a nice lunch off-campus, but everyone ruined it because they didn’t understand what prime rib was. I’m not even joking.

Anyway, yeah. Most Talented again.

There were more categories in the high school superlatives, so Mr. Popularity from eighth grade had to settle for a single one: Mr. Wheels, because he drove some souped-up pickup truck. Whatever. But there was another guy voted Best Looking and Most Popular and Mr. RCHS and a girl who won more than her share on his arm in every photo, so really, only the names had changed. Because superlatives are just the public acknowledgement of the popularity contest.

I liked to think the joke was on all those people who voted for me just because I played an instrument (badly) by ear. That I was even more talented than they knew. And that I would show them just how little they knew. I would take that talent they knew nothing about and write a book that would get picked up and published and I’d be a literary wunderkind a la Bret Easton Ellis and David Leavitt. I would show them. While Most Likely To Succeed was headed to medical school, I’d be living a bohemian existence in SoHo or Hell’s Kitchen, chain smoking and throwing back straight whiskey as I pounded out short stories and novels that would forever cement me as the rightful owner of the Class of 1988’s “Most Talented” Superlative.

But life happened. Life always happens. Being told you’re talented by people who place no value on talent means nothing, really. I’ve written about it before, the way my mother and her husband would constantly tell me that I could be anything I wanted to be, as long as I set my mind to it. And how dismissive and disingenuous it was. Like, it sounds great. “Oh, yeah. I can totally be anything I want to be as long as I set my mind to it!” But the reality is quite different, for a million different reasons that I won’t go into in this essay, because to be honest, I’m still processing some of these realizations.

I’m still writing. I don’t think I ever stopped. I did stop playing the fucking trombone, though. But it took years to get to a point in my life where I was confident enough with my ability to publish. I wrote about it to some degree in a previous essay, but there is much, much more to be said and I’ll deal with that when I deal with it. It’s a lot. It’s certainly more than I ever thought it would be, when I was a stupid kid thinking I would ride the wave of those Most Talented superlatives to a career as a writer.

And I went through a period where I thought all those people back in eighth grade and high school were trolling me with those Most Talented designations. The same way they nominated fat, unpopular girls for homecoming queen. But now, thirty-something years later, I think they meant it as a consolation prize. Like, “Oh, bless his heart. He’ll never amount to anything, so here’s this Most Talented award and no one else is using it, so…”

Yeah. Most Talented. Oof.