The Interview of an Unsuitable boy


In a bid to wrest a better life for himself through the means of an education at the expense of others, our young man and his clan, having little, or no means of vouchsafing an adult life on any one, least of all an abstraction like an education, our intrepid but gifted young man finds himself before a panel of potential benefactors, facing potential disaster as his unsuitability, in his perception, unbidden, slithers forth like an id, darkening the interview with Mephistophelean glee.

This begins to happen as the interview shifts focus from his accomplishments, to his background.

“So, do you have a brother?” asked the bright young man in brighter clothes of a value higher, possibly, than the cost of his tuition, and board for a full year. Our young man had noted imperceptible signs that the stern looking lady, who in fact seemed in no mood to benefit anyone not as benefactor, and, not especially a terrified urchin, who dared to bring his urgent youthfulness before her, not even with a smile.

“Do you have a brother?” she asked in a stentorian voice when his very brief pause became intolerable, to her. The words dropped like a horse’s hooves acanter on a cold city street; the shoes were pistol-shot sharp and peremptory.

“No sir and madam!” was our young man’s rather sharp response. He continued, “flawed, tainted, imperfect and unsuitable as I may be; I am the product of a marriage that produced myself only, so quickly did it fall apart, being as it was a liaison between a brilliant man but one ill fated to marry above his station. The inevitable breakdown, breakup, and divorce was a painful process that led to an attempted suicide but I couldn’t honestly tell you, good people if that attempt was designed to be a success, or a failure and therefore a sham, and or just an attempt to call attention unto myself, and perhaps stop the painful drift to disaster but I did survive, to a fractured life.

“My mother remarried, as did my father, she had two girls and he two boys. Now I don’t know if there is a clever reckoning that is beyond my ken, whereby: 2 half brothers = 1brother. But, in spite of any empathy I might have for that logic, I must insist that I do in fact, if not in logic, have two brothers.


“My dear boy, but I’ve heard you often said that in the light of the shortcomings, of your half siblings, that it was most definitely a case of a demonstrable 2=1!” this speaker was another young man every inch as bright and shiny as the first speaker. His airless voice, rich, sure and authoritative, stirred id and Mephistopheles even further; and the grim room acquired a gloom of gothic proportions, in the disconcerted mind of our young interviewee.

“Young man!” She shot him with that report of a voice. “Ill conceived and ill advised attempts at cleverness quite often leave one giving the frothing impression of being not only clever by half but desperate by a full measure! I strongly advise that you eschew all such demonstrations here. Retorts and syllogisms will do you no good here.”