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"The stigma of dropping out of college is\u2014what stigma? Half the movers and shakers of the world today seem to have traded college life for the rat race halfway through and, far from suffering for it, those Zuckerbergs and Gateses, with shocking speed, ruled as the king rats. The high school dropout, however, wears a badge of incompetence if not a virtual certificate of feeblemindedness. This might be irrelevant to the busboy or the guy who waves the flag at roadside work sites, but to someone anticipating a life in the arts\u2014and since all I&amp;#039;d ever done since childhood was write and draw, the arts seemed the only place I belonged\u2014a meager yield of formal education drags behind you like the anchor of the S.S. Brobdingnag. Only a high school dropout who has chosen to pit himself against his documented intellectual betters can know the sense of perpetual humiliation and social inferiority triggered by this belly flop in life&amp;#039;s first real challenge. To have abandoned high school well before finishing is to feel trapped in a social and professional underclass, forever academically outgunned in editorial offices and at dinner parties; to ache with envy of all the privileged brats who automatically passed Go, while you languish there on life&amp;#039;s Baltic or Mediterranean avenues. From day one of my freshman year at Malvern Collegiate in Toronto (whose student body at one time or another included Glenn Gould, Norman Jewison, and opera singer Teresa Stratas), I proceeded to relentlessly fail, flunking grade nine two years in a row before being shunted into grade 10 via a remedial class designed to groom the filing clerks of tomorrow. Made narcoleptic by bookkeeping and bored with punching the keys of a Victorian-era calculator called a comptometer, I bolted the next year to a technical high school and a commercial art course, where at least I knew what to do with my hands. And that was it. When our family moved cities that summer, the principal of my new school glanced at my anemic academic record and ordered me back to grade 10. I declined this final insult, and by lunchtime that first day, what there had been of a formal education had officially concluded.  I had grown up in the cultural vacuum of a small Ontario farming town in the 1940s, by age 11 already a veteran perpetrator with pencil and paper of what I regarded as mischievously humorous writings and drawings. One afternoon, while ransacking a living room closet for something to do, I spotted, behind the retired snowshoes and a spavined card table, a stack of magazines dating back to 1931. There were several volumes of them, each bound between homemade cardboard covers, each with a cutout of a twit regarding a butterfly through a monocle pasted on the front. They were, of course, old New Yorkers. To my parents, a couple of erstwhile &amp;#039;20s jazz babies, the New Yorker represented a distant world of breezy sophistication to which they had once aspired before they had been pinned down by too early a marriage, too many kids, and no money. But bless Tom and Peg McCall: Pawing hour after hour through their treasured archive not only made me Canada&amp;#039;s leading preteen prodigy of newyorkerphilia; what went on in those pages suddenly crystallized exactly what it was I&amp;#039;d been fumbling toward with my pens and pencils all along. Satire! Parody! Creative needling! Destiny! I advanced into early adulthood with gaze still fixed on New York, but less and less with any belief that I&amp;#039;d ever find a welcome there. Everybody knew that everybody connected with the &amp;quot;smart&amp;quot; magazines came from old money; went to Harvard, or at least Yale; summered on the Cape; married a deb; recited Horace while playing squash; and mixed with literary royalty at chic dinner parties in Manhattan penthouses. From graduation day onward, this superior breed trod an endless red carpet to various forms of glory. Against this I could muster, well, actually, nothing. No McCall had ever darkened a hall of ivy or any other genus of climbing vine. (My father had preceded me as a high school dropout.) I can&amp;#039;t recall that my hometown of Simcoe (pop. 6,000, most of them geezers in dusty overalls) was ever dubbed the Athens of Southwestern Ontario. Nor had charges of overweening worldliness ever been leveled at a McCall. And none of my five siblings and me had ever been likened to Franny and Zooey. Then there was undersize, undereducated, altogether underwhelming me. Canadians are born diffident, and I&amp;#039;d managed to work myself down several notches of self-esteem from there. Yet mere mediocrity was nothing compared with the secret that gnawed at my innards and defined me, to myself and the world, like a leper&amp;#039;s bell, and always would. Brain Cops Nab High School Dropout Attempting New York Publishing Break-In! After a period as a copywriter at Ogilvy &amp;amp;amp; Mather, where I worked on the Mercedes-Benz account, I had, by dint of blind luck and good fortune, gained a foothold at the National Lampoon, a New York\u2013based magazine flaunting wit and brainpower but with pictures and dirty words and a lust to smash the cultural crockery. I quickly discovered that the place was a nest of Harvard grads: just my luck. But wait! Far from pantsing me, they allayed my fears by badmouthing not only Harvard but the entire idea of higher education as, more or less, bullshit. I was immediately granted carte blanche to fill those antic pages with my nonsense. For the first time in my life I was prospering creatively, even if the Lampoon was an outlaw gang thumbing its nose at everything urbane, disciplined, and decorous. Alas, in the fall of 1975 the Lampoon was suddenly flattened by a runaway vehicle, later identified as Saturday Night Live, and never recovered. Thus orphaned, I was rapidly becoming a superannuated would-be wunderkind. Markets for my style of eccentric whimsy were few, if any. The New Yorker remained for me a remote castle on an inaccessible promontory. But I would die a coward if I never even tried. So one afternoon in October 1979, emboldened by a couple of lunchtime shots of Wild Turkey, I sat down and wrote the most timidly inoffensive little piece imaginable and, before I could second-guess myself, told my agent to send it you-know-where. Five days later my agent phoned: My piece had been taken. I didn&amp;#039;t know whether to laugh, cry, or vomit. The locked gate of forbidden dreams had swung open for me. I quickly sold another piece, and another, and another. When I finally met a living New Yorker editor in the flesh, the first thing he said was, &amp;quot;Gee, we were wondering why you never sent us anything before.&amp;quot; It wasn&amp;#039;t a fluke. The magazine has remained a home through four editors and 30-odd years. I&amp;#039;d spent half my life in anguished self-torture, afraid to pursue the only prize that counted because of the myth that success demands following the conventional path. I wish I could say that the falsity of that belief, finally exposed, made me free. But in the dark recesses of my soul I will always be a high school dropout first and whatever else I am second. In fact, I doubt that Town &amp;amp;amp; Country will deem this fit to publish. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/money-and-power/a1108/high-school-dropouts/>