The Topeka School

by Ben Lerner

child represented a farcical form of freedom, magical thinking against the increasingly administered life of the young adult. A teller of fantastic stories. Almost every object in the man-child’s world reflected this suspension between realms: his alcohol that was also soda, his weapons that were toys, how he might trade you two paper dollars for one of silver, valuing not credit so much as shine. He had trouble managing his height or facial hair and when he injured actual children while demonstrating a wrestling move (clothesline, facehammer, DDT), it was a case of his “not knowing his own strength.” He must, to fit the type, be not only male, but also white and able-bodied: the perverted form of the empire’s privileged subject. If he were a woman or a racialized or otherwise othered body, he would be in immediate mortal danger from sexual predators and police. It was his similarity to the dominant that rendered him pathetic and a provocation: the man-child was almost fit for school or work or service, could almost get his license, finally discard the dirt bike; too close to the norms to prove them by his difference, the real men—who are themselves in fact perpetual boys, since America is adolescence without end—had to differentiate themselves with violence, Klaus’s voice.