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Banana Split | Jan 05 2002

At sixteen, in an act of pure desperation, I took an aptitude test. Soon after taking this test, I dropped out of high school—or rather, announced having done so, for I had actually stopped attending classes the previous academic year.

The test I took consisted of several hundred yes/no questions. You answered the questions and tallied the results. This left you with a three-letter code, which you looked up in a different section of the book. There you saw a list of jobs typically performed by people with that three-letter code.

When I turned to the page with my particular three-letter code, it listed but a single job title. This seemed strange, as most of the other three-letter codes had a dozen or more job titles.

The first thing I thought at this moment—I mean after turning to the page with the solitary job title—was of the banana splits at Woolworth’s. When I was a kid, I would buy a banana split at the counter at Woolworth’s, and this banana split would cost whatever was written on a little piece of paper inside a balloon I would pick from among dozens of balloons floating above the counter. I knew going in that the banana split would cost no more than a banana split would normally cost, which was $1.29, but I also knew that the banana split could cost as little as a penny. Or that was what the sign said. When I first started buying banana splits this way, I assumed that the average banana split would cost sixty-five cents (the average of a penny and $1.29), but as it turned out, most of those little pieces of paper said $1.29, or something very close to $1.29. I know this because my grandfather Abbie would take me to Woolworth’s all the time, and we eventually realized what was going on. It was a lesson I’ never forgotten.

Anyway, the reason I thought of those banana splits when I discovered my single job title was because no one had ever said that my three-letter code would lead to a certain number of job titles. I had assumed that, and my assumption had been wrong.

This hadn’t been my only assumption, nor even the most important. The most important had been that taking an aptitude test thing would turn out to be a big fucking waste of time. This assumption proved to be true: taking that aptitude test turned out to be a big fucking waste of time. And not so much because I ended up with a solitary job title, but because of what that solitary job title said.

It said Furrier.

Listen: When I was sixteen, the only person who had ever meant anything to me was my grandfather Abbie, who had died the previous year.

Abbie had been a furrier.

I usedMy grandfather Abbie to go into his basement sometimes, where he had his workshop, and there I would look at his table, his sewing machine, and his enormous collection of pins, and I would think, Not for one million dollars.

So I closed the aptitude test book and went back to my earlier plan, the one I’d had before deciding to take an aptitude test. This plan was simple. It was to drop out of school, write poetry until my money ran out, and kill myself.

Later, I mean many years later, I read about the test I’d taken and came to understand my crazy result. My three-letter code is rare, given that the first two letters—representing artist types and detail people, respectively— don’t often go together. Notably, the making of a fur coat calls on both sensibilities.

As does the web development. Of course when I took that test, the web lay thirteen years in the future, and then it took me nine more years to discover it. But now that I’ve discovered it, I’m happy, relatively, and feel fed by what I do, as opposed to eaten by it, and so I feel lucky I didn’t kill myself.

I miss my grandfather, though, something terrible.