Jonathan Franzen - The Discomfort Zone

For three years, all through junior high, my social death was grossly overdetermined. I had a large vocabulary, a giddily squeaking voice, horn-rimmed glasses, poor arm strength, too-obvious approval from my teachers, irresistible urges to shout unfunny puns, a near-eidetic acquaintance with J.R.R. Tolkien, a big chemistry lab in my basement, a penchant for intimately insulting any unfamiliar girl unwise enough to speak to me, and so on. But the real cause of death, as I saw it, was my mother’s refusal to let me wear jeans to school. Even my old friend Manley, who played drums and could do twenty-three pull-ups and was elected class president in ninth grade, could not afford to see me socially.

Help finally arrived in tenth grade, when I discovered Levi’s straight-legged corduroys and, through the lucky chance of my Congregational affiliation, found myself at the center of the Fellowship clique at the high school. Almost overnight, I went from dreading lunch hour to happily eating at one of the crowded Fellowship tables, presided over by Peppel, Kortenhof, and Schroer. Even Manley, who was now playing drums in a band called Blue Thyme, had started coming to Fellowship meetings. One Saturday in the fall of our junior year, he called me up and asked if I wanted to go to the mall with him. I’d been planning to hang out with my science buddy Weidman, but I ditched him in a heartbeat and we never hung out again.

At lunch on Monday, Kortenhof gleefully reported that our padlock was still on the flagpole and that no flag had been raised. (It was 1976, and the high school was lax in its patriotic duties.) The obvious next step, Kortenhof said, was to form a proper group and demand official recognition. So we wrote a note—

Dear Sir,

We have kidnapped your flagpole. Further details later.

— made a quick decision to sign it “U.N.C.L.E.” (after the sixties TV show), and delivered it to the mail slot of the high-school principal, Mr. Knight.

Mr. Knight was a red-haired, red-bearded, Nordic-looking giant. He had a sideways, shambling way of walking, with frequent pauses to hitch up his pants, and he stood with the stooped posture of a man who spent his days listening to smaller people. We knew his voice from his all-school intercom announcements. His first words—“Teachers, excuse the interruption”—often sounded strained, as if he’d been nervously hesitating at his microphone, but after that his cadences were gentle and offhanded.

What the six of us wanted, more than anything else, was to be recognized by Mr. Knight as kindred spirits, as players outside the ordinary sphere of student misbehavior and administrative force. And for a week our frustration steadily mounted, because Mr. Knight remained aloof from us, as impervious as the flagpole (which, in our correspondence, we liked to represent as personally his).

After school on Monday, we cut and pasted words and letters from magazines:

The phrase “Teachers, excuse the interruption” was Manley’s idea, a poke at Mr. Knight. But Manley was also worried, as was I, that the administration would crack down hard on our little group if we got a reputation for vandalism, and so we returned to school that night with a can of aluminum paint and repaired the damage we’d done to the flagpole in hammering the old lock off. In the morning, we delivered the ransom note, and two-thirty found the six of us, in our respective classrooms, unreasonably hoping that Mr. Knight would make an announcement.

Our third note was typed on a sheet of notepaper headed with a giant avocado-green HELLO:

Being as we are a brotherhood of kindly fellows, we are giving you one last chance. And observing that you have not complied with our earlier request, we are hereby reiterating it. To wit: your official recognition of our organization over the public address system at 2:59, Wednesday, March 17. If you comply, your flagpole will be returned by Thursday morning.

U.N.C.L.E.

We also made an U.N.C.L.E. flag out of a pillowcase and black electrician’s tape and ran it up the flagpole under cover of night. But Mr. Knight’s office didn’t even notice the flag until Kortenhof casually pointed it out to a teacher — two maintenance workers were then sent outside to cut our lock with a hacksaw and lower the pirate flag — and he ignored the note. He ignored a fourth note, which offered him two dollars in compensation for the broken school padlock. He ignored a fifth note, in which we reiterated our offer and dispelled any notion that our flag had been raised in celebration of St. Patrick’s Day.

By the end of the week, the only interest we’d succeeded in attracting was that of other students. There had been too much huddling and conspiring in hallways, too much blabbing on Kortenhof’s part. We added a seventh member simply to buy his silence. A couple of girls from Fellowship grilled me closely: Flagpole? Uncle? Can we join?

As the whispering grew louder, and as Kortenhof developed a new plan for a much more ambitious and outstanding prank, we decided to rename ourselves. Manley, who had a half-insolent, half-genuine fondness for really stupid humor, proposed the name DIOTI. He wrote it down and showed it to me.

“An anagram for ‘idiot’?”

Manley giggled and shook his head. “It’s also tio , which is ‘uncle’ in Spanish, and ‘di,’ which means ‘two.’ U.N.C.L.E. Two. Get it?”

“Di-tio.”

“Except it’s scrambled. DIOTI sounds better.”

“God, that is stupid.”

He nodded eagerly, delightedly. “I know! It’s so stupid! Isn’t it great?”

NINE OF USwere piling out of two cars very late on the last Saturday of the school year, wearing dark clothes and dark stocking caps, carrying coils of rope, and zipping up knapsacks that contained hammers, wrenches, pliers, screwdrivers, and customized floor plans of the high school, when a police car rounded the corner of Selma Avenue and turned on its searchlight.

My instinct in police situations, honed by years of shooting off fireworks in a community where they were banned, was to take off running into the dark of the nearest lawn. Half of DIOTI came loping and scattering after me. It was a long time since I’d run through dark lawns uninvited. There was dew on everything, and you could encounter a dog, you could hook your foot in a croquet wicket. I stopped and hid in a group of rhododendrons where Schroer, the Monty Python disciple, was also hiding.

“Franzen? Is that you? You’re making an incredible amount of noise.”

In my knapsack, besides tools, I had Easter candy and green plastic Easter hay, five rhymed quatrains that I’d typed on slips of bond paper, and other special equipment. As my own breathing moderated, I could hear the breathing of the squad car’s engine in the distance, the murmur of discussion. Then, more distinctly, a shouted whisper: “Ally-ally-out-’n’-free! Ally-ally-out-’n’-free!” The voice belonged to Holyoke, one of our new recruits, and at first I didn’t understand what he was saying. The equivalent call on my own street was ally-ally-in-come-free.

“The story,” Holyoke whispered as we followed him toward the patrol car, “is we’re tying a door shut. Gerri Chopin’s front door. We’re going to the Chopins’ house to tie her door shut. We’re using the ropes to tie the door. And the tools are for taking off the hinges.”

“Michael, that doesn’t make any—”

“Why take off the hinges if we’re tying—”

“Hello!”

“Hello, Officer!”

The patrolman was standing in his headlight beams, examining knapsacks, checking IDs. “This is all you have? A library card?”