Jack Dobbs

Jack Dobbs realized he was an idiot on the 29th of May, at 12:43pm while playing basketball. The color of the sky was blue, the sun was shining with yellow hues galore, and a woman nearby was singing to her baby. The grass at the green park beckoned to him, and it struck him, with some mild worry and constipation in his stomach, that he was dumb.

All of his life, Jack had felt smart: his teachers in high school read him Kant and praised his ability to decipher philosophy. His math teacher said he could solve a derivative at the speed of light. Thoughts raced through his mind at the crack of dawn, so he took some pills to cover up his mental disorder. A doctor gave him some lithium, and then some Risperdal, and then some Xanax. He found the pills to be mildly soothing, and so he took some more. He wasn’t really concerned with people seeing him as a bit crazy, but he felt really embarrassed that he was an idiot.

People all throughout his life had told him that he was street dumb, but it never registered in his mind why. Jack was raised in a diplomatic household, with parents who paid for maids, cooks, and cleaners. He never had to endure the streets or projects of hard cities–Burroughs like Harlem were new to him upon arriving in Manhattan. He was never like Jay-Z. Jay-Z dealt drugs and knew how to evade the cops. He was a gangster who could rhyme. Jack also had a way with words but just wasn’t as smart as Jay. Jack never was a drug dealer. He didn’t much care for sex sometimes and didn’t always think about how to date people. In fact, Jack didn’t really understand what street smarts were–he only knew that he was book smart.

In college, all of the pretty girls would flock to the jocks and guys in fraternities. They were the ones scoring chicks after all. The guys in Sig Ep would make fun of Jack because he didn’t pick up on social cues and was really awkward. They would secretly make fun of him, but when they saw the prowess of his writing skills, they suddenly became impressed. And when he changed genders from female to male, they became scared, because Jack could pass really well as a guy, and even started acting like them. He adopted their same mannerisms—his jaw became super square, he made his chest a bit flat, and suddenly his legs took on way more musculature. His voice deepened, and he started acting like he had a stick in his pants.

The literature professors at Yale discussed Jack’s temperament behind closed doors. Jack was blissfully unaware of their discussions, but they were in awe of these opinion columns that he was writing for the Yale Daily News. Something about the opinion columns was just different—he was using words that they had never heard of before, and these were teachers who went to places like Harvard and Cornell. But they thought that Jack had a lot of problems in life, because he had a raging bipolar disorder, and they also thought that he could have had some version of mild schizophrenia as well. He would walk, quietly manic, along the streets of New Haven, but mutter these apt platitudes in classrooms in the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. He was a Political Science major, because his mother was a US ambassador, and one of his teachers told him a paper he wrote on the Hindu Pakistani conflict was the most impressive work she had ever seen.

Jack was, for all intents and purposes, a genius, but he was, as he realized on May 29th, an idiot as well. Jack couldn’t understand his bouts of idiocy: he didn’t know when he was being an idiot as opposed to when not. In social settings, he didn’t know how to make small talk and couldn’t crack any great jokes. People made fun of him, and thought he was weird, and called him lots of names behind his back. Jack was also socially inept–he didn’t pick up on social cues and didn’t have a lot of social grace, and in social situations, thought too much about himself, paralyzing in fear of being judged. Social social social, he muttered to himself. Social is not who I am.

But Jack became famous without even knowing it. Everyone at Yale knew his name: the professors knew his name, his college dean was quietly in love with him, and his classmates would stare at him in Beinecke Library, when he walked there absentminded in front of a security guard who was concerned for his well-being. Jack was in a secret society called Elihu, and even there the kids made fun of him. See, Jack was parapsychotic—he was dealing with flirtations in psychosis—so he would say strange and unusual things. He also felt like, deep down, he had no friends, and the kids in Elihu were glorified versions of a liberal-minded frat house. Jack didn’t do well in frats—he couldn’t survive in frats—so he was relentlessly mocked and put down. When he exited into the real world, he suddenly had an easy time making friends, because, well, people were nice.

In the real world, Jack met bartenders and consultants and marines and other writers who were generally nice to him if he was nice back. He felt less judged by his peers. He kind of liked the real world. He also met trans men who led pretty standard lives—one of them was a former EMT with the Air Force, another was working at a nonprofit and took trips to Kazakhstan and Ukraine, before the heinous war broke out that Putin led with ferocity.

Jack seemed to like the real world a lot, but one thing remained the same: he was dumb.