The Todd Glass Situation (3 page)

The street was called Sunshine Road. There was plenty of sunshine, because the developers had plowed down almost every tree in the neighborhood to make room for the houses. Still, we'd been so starved for nature that even the smallest hint of life was enough to get us worked up. On our first day in the new house, my mom woke all of us up at dawn to show us a squirrel in the yard. My older brother Michael—who was maybe eight—ran back into the house to shake me out of bed.
“Todd! Mom's not lying . . . There is a fucking squirrel in the yard!”

There was also a girl in our neighborhood who would sometimes walk past our house. Back then, most people used the word “retarded” to describe her. But we'd scream a different word when we saw her ambling up the street:

“MONSTER!”

Of course I was a kid and I didn't know any better, but I still feel guilty and embarrassed when I think about it today—even as an adult, I hope she didn't understand what we were yelling at her. It's not a memory I'm proud of. It also turned out to be more than a little bit ironic, given what was about to happen next.

The new home meant a new school and a chance for a fresh start. But as I started second grade at Davis Elementary, it didn't take long for me to figure out that my retention skills weren't getting any better.

In case you haven't already figured it out, I was—and still am—dyslexic. And to make matters worse, I also have severe attention deficit disorder.

But I didn't know any of this back then—all I knew was that my attention span was shot to shit. It still is, by the way. I can't sit still for more than a few minutes without sweating until I'm drenched or falling asleep. Forget about reading newspapers or following complicated movie plots. If I meet someone new and he starts telling me about his job, I'll be checked out before he gets halfway through.

“Come on, let me give it a shot,” the guy will continue, fully confident in his ability to explain mortgage annuities in a way that would make sense to a four-year-old. “So you know that banks make loans, called mortgages?”

“Yeah . . .”

“Now imagine you can take all those loans and combine them into . . .”

Cue my thoughtful face.
Now hold it . . . Hold it . . . Hold it . . . That should do the trick.
Close with the “I got it” face and walk away before he asks me another question.

What can I say? It's worked since kindergarten.

Some people have also told me that I have obsessive-compulsive disorder, but I think that's just because I like things to be neat and clean. If I seem a little OCD, it's probably related to the ADD and the dyslexia—I don't function very well in chaotic environments, so I do my best to get rid of chaos whenever I can. People sometimes are quick to label you OCD if you're an organized person. I don't think that's fair. I know a lot of people who are messy and I don't immediately assume they're pigs. “You don't like to do your dishes right after you eat? You must be a filthy pig!”

Look, I know a lot of people think that kids today are over-diagnosed. Undoubtedly some of them are. But there are plenty of kids who are legitimately suffering and need help. Even now, dyslexia is not an easy condition to diagnose.

When I failed—and seriously, folks, who fails second grade unless they're suffering from some kind of serious issue?—I began third grade in the Resource Room.

The Resource Room was a catchall for the students who couldn't keep pace with the rest of the class. Today we try to act a little more enlightened in the way we treat our kids. We don't lump dyslexics together with the kids who are suffering from Down syndrome or autism—each of these conditions has its
own form of treatment. But in the 1970s, we were all grouped together.

What the kids in the Resource Room did have in common is that none of us responded well to classroom teaching, so we spent a lot of time outside of the classroom. We were always walking somewhere on some kind of class trip, where we could at least get some kind of visual stimulation to keep us from tearing the room to pieces. When we passed the open doors of the other classrooms—past the kids who had been my classmates a year earlier—I tried to slip into the middle of the pack to make myself invisible. Unfortunately, I wasn't the only one with that plan—almost every other kid in my class wanted to hide in the middle, too. So we pushed, we pulled, and we shoved, moving through the halls like the least coordinated marching band in the world. Needless to say, my efforts to avoid drawing attention didn't really work out the way I had hoped.

And kids being kids, well, now I was the one who was getting called names.

To be honest, the names didn't bother me all that much. While I didn't know at the time that I was dyslexic, I was pretty sure that I wasn't retarded. I might have trouble with reading and math or focusing on anything for more than twenty seconds, but I knew that I wasn't as bad off as the girl who walked through our neighborhood, or even some of the other kids in the Resource Room. So the mean kids never really got to me.

No, what made me break into a sweaty panic attack were the
nice
kids. The ones who weren't in any way trying to be cruel, but were just curious about the mysterious, uncoordinated mob
who seemed to be living totally outside of the normal school experience.

“Why are you in that room?” they'd always ask nicely. “What are you?”

I didn't know. Neither did my teachers. Their overall strategy was pretty much the same for every kid in the Resource Room: They tried to figure out what underlying emotional problems kept us from keeping up with the rest of the class.

Sometimes they'd bring in outside therapists. I remember one who had us draw pictures of life at home. Here was this guy who had never met me before, asking in his most pleasantly condescending tone of voice if the boy I'd drawn was happy.

“No.”

“No?”

“No. His parents beat him.”

The therapist paused thoughtfully. “Todd, do your parents beat you?”

“Of course not! You asked me about the kid in the picture.
His
parents are nuts.”

Like always I tried to keep my teachers amused. During one of our class trips, I asked Mrs. Biazzi if she wanted to hear a joke.

“I had a dream last night that I was in a room and there were all these clocks . . .” This was a joke I'd heard from my oldest brother, Spencer. I knew from watching him that I should try to keep my delivery natural. “There was this guy there and I asked him what all these clocks were for. He told me that every time a clock's hands go all the way around, somebody has just jerked off.”

Mrs. Biazzi's jaw dropped to the floor, which I took to be a
good sign. Time to deliver the punch line—I wanted to tie it to someone we knew, so I chose my classmate Dennis. “So I asked the guy in the dream where Dennis's clock was, and he told me they kept it in the attic where they used it as a fan.”

I still can't believe Mrs. Biazzi let me finish the joke, although, looking back now, I realize that she was just out of college. What twenty-three-year-old isn't going to let an eight-year-old finish a joke about jerking off?

I don't know whether my teachers thought I was “cured” or were just sick of my shtick, but in fourth grade I found myself back in a regular classroom. Once again, my teachers tried desperately to help me, doing everything they could to get me through the year. They used to give out awards to encourage kids to do well in school. It makes me laugh to this day when I think about them, huddling together in the teachers' lounge, trying to figure out which award to present to me. Least Attentive? Excellence in Window-Gazing? Most Pencils Sharpened?

My parents had the same problem—whenever they used to brag about their kids they would always struggle to find a way to say something nice about me. “Let's see . . . Michael got straight A's, Spencer is joining a fraternity this year, and Corey's baseball team just won the championship. And look at Todd . . . What an appetite! He ate a whole pizza all by himself!”

When I failed fourth grade, my teachers weren't entirely sure what to do with me, but my parents saved them the trouble of having to figure it out by moving again.

A
few years ago my brother Spencer and I drove through Churchville, the neighborhood we moved to when I was eleven. I pointed to a modest mound of dirt that was almost hidden among the houses.

“Wow . . . I guess they mowed down the old hill.”

Spencer squinted at me. “What do you mean?”

“That mound of dirt. That used to be the hill, that giant hill we used to play on.”

“The hill hasn't changed, Todd.”

“No no no no no . . . They must have . . .”

Of course Spencer was right. The hill hadn't changed, I had. My eleven-year-old perception of the world had developed a lot
since then. As it turned out, there were plenty of things that I thought were true back then that turned out to be misconceptions. Like, for example . . .

The house was in a new development called Woodgate. Unlike our previous neighborhood, where anything green had been clear-cut to make room for the houses, whoever built Woodgate tried to keep the natural environment intact. We had trees and leaves and a creek that ran next to our house. Compared to Sunshine Road, it felt like we were living in the forest.

I started fifth grade at Fred J. Stackpole Elementary, where all I wanted to do was to fit in. I wanted to be in a regular class. I wanted to make regular friends. I promised myself that I'd focus harder this time and really try to pass.

“Hey,” one of my new classmates greeted me. “Didn't you used to go to Davis Elementary?”

“Yeah,” I cautiously admitted. “In third grade.”

“So did my friend James Kirkland. Did you know him?”

I immediately started to panic. I didn't know his friend, because his friend probably attended regular classes. Now this kid was going to know that I spent the year in the Resource Room. Any chance I had for a fresh start was going to be gone before it even had a chance to begin. I shook my head “no” and quickly shifted the conversation to something else.

If you smoke cigarettes, it's kind of funny to look back on your first puff—how you didn't realize it at the time, but you were beginning a habit that would go on for years. This little
white lie was a similar moment in my life—the moment when I realized I could shift conversations away from topics I was trying to hide.

And so a new habit was born. Over the years I've become completely ruthless in the ways I use it. I won't think twice about faking an injury or spilling a drink on an innocent bystander if it will help me get out of a question that I'm too uncomfortable to answer. I'd pour hot coffee on your baby if you asked me when I was going to meet a nice girl and settle down.

As it turned out, I was just being paranoid. This kid wasn't trying to poke holes in my story. My fresh start remained intact. I gutted out the school year, faking everyone into believing that I was learning. And my plan probably would have worked, except . . .

My parents knew I needed help. After school, I'd sometimes visit with a friend of my mom's, a teacher, who worked with me on my homework. She was great—nice, smart, and surprisingly helpful with my studies. Sometimes she even cooked dinner for me after we were done.

“How do you like it?” she asked me as I chowed down.

“Good,” I replied. “Except for the mashed potatoes. They're a little lumpy.”

“Lumpy?”

I wasn't trying to be a dick. I thought I was being honest. I liked my potatoes fluffy, the way my mom made them, and I told her so.

“You take that back!” she said.

“What?!”

“Take it back, or you're not getting any dessert.”

I refused. There was no way I was going to sacrifice my integrity at the altar of lumpy mashed potatoes just to get ahead in life. That was the last time she ever made dinner for me—or helped me with my studies—and I failed fifth grade, all because I couldn't keep my fucking mouth shut about her lumpy mashed potatoes.

But what kind of monster ruins a kid's life over mashed potatoes? I may not have been able to retain any of what I was learning at school, but I had learned an even more valuable lesson:

My obsession with landscaping began in third grade. There was something about the job that fascinated me. I'd sit for hours, pretending to smoke a pretzel stick like a cigarette, watching our local landscaper—give him fifteen minutes and a truckful of sod, and he could transform a bare patch of dirt into a thriving lawn. He was almost like a god, taking chaos and turning it into something beautiful.

But I couldn't stand the way he just carelessly threw his tools into the back of his pickup truck. Maybe I was only eight, but I knew that professionals were supposed to store their tools on frames built out of two-by-fours. And that his truck should have the name of his company painted on it. It burned me up, until one day I couldn't take it anymore. I stubbed out my
pretzel stick, marched over, and told him everything that he was doing wrong.

About a week later, I saw him again. “Hey, Todd!” he called out to me. “I took your suggestions.”

The frame looked half-assed, dangerous, and unstable. He'd done the lettering on his truck with a stencil—even to a kid with a reading disability, it was clear he'd done a shitty, unprofessional job. But there he was, beaming with pride, clearly looking for my approval. “What do you think?”

It turns out I'd learned something from the mashed potato incident with the tutor. “Looks great,” I lied.