Whiz Kid (a short story)

His name was Parker Hoffman, but we just always called him Whiz Kid.

The Hoffman family moved into our neighborhood during the summer between my sixth and seventh grade years. My buddies and I actually didn’t even notice Parker at first, only because we were instantly focused on his older sister, Naomi. She was two years older than us, and was the most beautiful specimen of a female any of us had seen up to that time in our lives. She wasn’t quite Daisy Duke, not yet, but she definitely had the potential to be, in our estimation and in our imaginations.

Our interest in Parker didn’t come about until a few weeks after the Hoffmans arrived. My buddy Tanner asked us one night, as we sat on the curb under the streetlight, if any of us had met the new guy yet. The rest of us had only seen his sister, and hadn’t even noticed that there was a male kid in the new family!

We soon learned that ninth grade girls about to enter high school had much more on their minds than anything a pack of seventh grade boys could muster up. No doubt we looked pretty foolish to her, doing “wheelies” on our Sting-Ray bikes whenever she came outside, timing our curb jumps for just the right moment when she might be looking our way, and practically drooling all over ourselves whenever we saw her out in the front yard or walking from her front door to their car in the driveway. She was totally unimpressed with all of us.

So we struck up a friendship with Parker instead. Admittedly, there were ulterior motives involved when we first started letting him hang out with us. He grew tired of us asking immature, probing questions about his sister. But as Naomi remained totally disinterested in us, and as we got to know Parker a little better, our impenetrable Gang of Four had slowly opened up to become the Gang of Five.

The original four of us were like inseparable brothers. Tanner, Zach, Robbie and I had lived in the neighborhood our entire lives, gone to school together since kindergarten, and spent every summer together. Our parents, brothers and sisters were all close friends. We all went to church together. We were in Cub Scouts, Webelos, Boy Scouts, and now played baseball and flag football together. All the blood pacts, secret talks about our crushes, stolen cigarettes that made us sick, and practical jokes played on those poor saps who could never be in our circle, had forged a bond that would be hard to break for the rest of our lives. For this new kid Parker to gradually break into a tight circle of friendship like ours was quite an achievement.

As much as we each tried to pretend that no one could ever penetrate our little cell, it slowly happened while we weren’t looking. During long conversations under the streetlights and hanging out under the big oak tree where the toe sack swing was, we gradually came to know Parker over that first summer.  We all soon realized that even though he was different from us, there was this magnetic attraction to him that none of us could ignore.

Parker was a conversationalist, and he got us to talking about things we’d never considered before. He broadened our horizons, to say the least. He seemed to know everything about anything. Robbie was a baseball junkie, and we had long considered him one of the world’s top baseball experts. But Parker could spout standings and statistics about every major league team, not only for the current season, but for all seasons. He was a walking encyclopedia about baseball, and all sports, for that matter. I considered myself an expert on coins, and had a growing coin collection that I was very proud of, but Parker taught me things about rare coins that I had never known. Each of us were growing increasingly amazed at this new kid and about how much we didn’t know about the world. How could so much knowledge be packed inside of one kid’s brain?

You see, Parker was a genius. Not just a smart kid…we were all smart kids. He was a true Genius – capital G . When school started that September, it didn’t take long for word to get around that this new kid was no ordinary seventh grader. Teachers would point him out to each other and whisper as our gang walked down the hall. He easily won the spelling bee that fall, defeating Natalie Ballard, who had been the undefeated champion of our school ever since we started having spelling bees in the second grade. He led our school to the UIL State Championship in academics that year in seventh grade. He was in all the upper-level classes, often helping the teachers by spending time with those students who needed some extra tutoring on the classwork.

It was inevitable that Parker be given a nickname; he was that different. By the end of the fall semester of that seventh grade year, he was known throughout the school as “Whiz Kid”, and that name stuck with him all the way through high school. Occasionally, someone who didn’t know him well would call him “Whiz”, but he hated that. “Whiz Kid”, he willingly wore with pride, but “Whiz” reminded him of someone urinating, and he didn’t tolerate that, nor did we.

What set Whiz Kid apart from other super-intelligent people was that, for him, it wasn’t enough to just know something as a basic fact. For him to accept something, to fully understand something, he had to also understand the proof – what made it so. For most of us, if we were to see a marble exhibit the behavior of rolling down a sloped table, that would be all we really needed to know. It would be enough to know that the table was sloped, and that simple gravity tugged on that little marble and caused it to roll. Whiz Kid would see the marble roll like the rest of us, but he also knew and fully understood the physics behind that movement.  He understood the equations that defined the vector components of the marble’s trajectory, the force of gravity that caused it, and how to calculate the velocity of the marble given a particular slope and weight. He even knew the force with which the marble would hit the ground when it eventually fell off the table. If Whiz Kid said it, we believed it, because we knew that he had worked it out, researched it, and proven it to himself before he ever put it out there for the rest of the world to take.

We ALWAYS believed Whiz Kid. Always.

I often pictured the inside of Whiz Kid’s brain as having three file drawers in it, each full of folders. One file drawer was full of folders stamped “PROVEN & ACCEPTED”. One drawer was full of folders that were stamped “KNOWN BUT NOT PROVEN YET”. And the third drawer had folders marked “SPECULATION-STILL NOT PROVEN”. By the end of High School, that “PROVEN AND ACCEPTED” file drawer was stuffed full, I know.

Our High School years were pretty normal, fun, and good. The five of us were working hard, making good grades and excelling in the extra-curricular activities we participated in. When it came time to think about college, our counselor, Mr. Brown, encouraged Tanner, Zach, Robbie and me to start applying early. He had it in his mind that we all needed to go to Texas A&M University, and steered us in that direction. We were, after all, sons of middle-class, hard-working Texas families, and A&M was where we belonged. He even helped to arrange some local scholarships for each of us to help us on our way once we were accepted.

Parker, however, seemed destined for a different track. In the spring of our Junior year, we noticed that Mr. Brown would have Parker in his office quite often for meetings, along with Mr. Baker, our principal. We’d quiz him about the meetings and he’d just say that they were talking about which college he should go to. We knew that the Hoffman family was just as middle class as ours, so we just assumed that Mr. Brown felt the need to guide Parker to bigger and better things due to his unusual gift of intelligence.

Parker ended up going to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.  In so many ways, it’s a long way from Tyler, Texas to Providence. Shortly after he left for Brown, I heard from my mom that his family had left the neighborhood, moving back to central Kansas where they had lived before, to be near his mom’s ailing parents. The Gang of Five soon reverted back to just the Gang of Four again, but even the old ways of the gang sort of faded into the distance that first year in college, as we each found new relationships, new friends, varied routines and activities. It was good for us, we felt, to broaden our horizons.

We remained friends and would get together at least monthly at the Dixie Chicken to share a beer and catch up with each other’s lives. Invariably, the conversation would turn to Whiz Kid. We would talk about his amazing intellect, how he was always so sure about the things he would talk about with us. There was no doubt in our minds that he was the reason we were all where we were at this stage in our lives, a budding civil engineer, a chemistry grad student, a future medical doctor, and a future aerospace engineer. We all knew that it was Whiz Kid who had opened our eyes to the world – enticing us to explore, to study, and to truly understand the world around us.

In June of 1983, the four of us made plans to go back to Tyler for our 5-year high school reunion. I was looking forward to it, primarily because I was hoping to see Parker again. No one had seen or heard from him for several years, although my mom had heard rumors that he had graduated from Brown in the spring of 1980, 2 years ahead of schedule, gone to graduate school, and had taken a job with the government, living in the Washington D.C. area. The gossip was that his job was a scientific research position involving some top-secret project that involved national defense, but of course no one knew the details. That story seemed perfectly consistent with the image we had all had of where Parker would ultimately wind up.

Parker didn’t come to the reunion, much to our dismay, and the four of us were convinced we knew why.  Just a few months earlier, President Reagan had made his famous “Star Wars” speech to the nation, in which he announced that the U.S. was embarking on a dramatic new initiative to protect our country from attack by the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal. The technology was so futuristic that it was compared to the imaginary weapons found in the popular Star Wars movie from a few years earlier.  The Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, was all over the news that spring and summer, and as the guys and I huddled at the end of the bar at the reunion, we speculated that perhaps that was what Parker was working on. It seemed logical, and surely only something as big and important as that would keep Parker from coming back to Tyler for our reunion.

A few months after the reunion, my work took me to Washington for a few days. I decided that I would try my best to locate Parker and try to meet up with him while I was there. I contacted his sister in Tyler and his parents in Kansas, but they acted as if he was totally estranged from their family. He had avoided their calls and not returned their letters. None of them had seen or heard from him in over 6 months. Naomi, however, did have an address from his last letter, which she gave to me.

On the last afternoon I was there, I found the address in Arlington, Virginia, and waited for him on the steps outside the house. I waited for what seemed like an eternity, and was about to give up and leave when he finally showed up around 6:30. He looked nothing like the Parker I once knew, barely recognizable to me. He was extremely haggard, with a long beard, thick glasses, and was probably 40 pounds lighter than when I had last seen him. He reminded me of The Amazing Kreskin, the goofball “mentalist” we used to watch on TV every Saturday night when we were boys back in Tyler.  Parker had that same wide upper lip, large nose and some over-sized, thick glasses that I had never seen him wear before.  He looked annoyed with my presence, as if I was some stranger intruding on his precious time.

“Paul, what are you doing here?”, he asked, without even a handshake, hug, or even a smile that might show he was happy to see me.  He walked swiftly, barely breaking his stride as I grabbed my coat and caught up to his side.

“Nice to see you, too!”, I said.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude, It’s just a shock to see you here. Really bad timing…lots going on right now. Couldn’t you have called?” he asked.

“No one has your number! I tried your mom and your sister, they feel like you’ve dropped off the face of the earth!” I said.

“Come on, we’ll go down to the restaurant around the corner where we can talk”, he said, shaking his head in frustration.

He reached up with his left hand to adjust the big glasses, in just the same way the Amazing Kreskin would have done it.

As we sat down at the table and ordered a beer, I could get a better look at his face. He was clearly stressed out about something. Something serious. The bridge of his nose was permanently furrowed. His hands were a little shaky, and he seemed really nervous. His eyes would not meet mine, and he continually scanned the room as if he were looking for someone. Or, more precisely, keeping an eye out for someone.

“So, tell me. How have you been? You seem a little stressed out. What’s going on?”, I asked.

“I’m okay, just really busy”, he said, unconvincingly. “I’ve been working in this job at the Pentagon, a special project.  Can’t tell you much about it.  It’s been interesting, but just a little bit of a challenge here these last few weeks”.

As we talked more and drank more, Parker eventually revealed to me that he was in fact an integral part of the government’s Strategic Defense Initiative that we’d heard so much about.  In fact, it was this genius buddy of mine from Tyler, Texas, who originally dreamed up the hair-brained idea in the first place. As part of his doctoral thesis at Brown, Parker had theorized that laser systems could be scattered around the globe and at the fringes of space, and used to blast missiles out of the sky as they flew at lightening speed towards the U.S., armed with nuclear warheads.  It didn’t take long for someone in the Defense Department to notice what this young graduate student had come up with.  The politicians immediately recognized that this new concept could finally put an end to the decades of military tit-for-tat with the Soviets. They knew that SDI meant there could finally be a Cold War victory, while avoiding the unthinkable, final result that had been on every American leader’s mind for generations – mutually assured destruction. SDI was, quite simply, huge for our nation and the world.

Some say that the Strategic Defense Initiative was one of the most ambitious projects we’ve ever undertaken as a nation, not unlike the Apollo program which put a man on the moon. But it was controversial as well, and had its share of detractors.  It swallowed up a massive amount of our defense budget for more than a decade. The technology truly was so futuristic at the time, that it was looked at by many skeptics to be more science fiction than true science.

At the time President Reagan announced the SDI program to the world, the Soviet Union was nearly bankrupt. Their economy was in shambles from decades of poor performance based on the false promises of Communism. The last thing the Soviets could do at that point in time was to try and keep up with the USA by investing the trillions of dollars needed to match the SDI program, or to try and counter it with a new defense system of their own. It wasn’t long before there was a thaw in the Cold War between our two countries, and the Soviet Union imploded from a lack of effective leadership and resources. The seemingly perfect defense plan that the U.S. had dreamed up was just too much for the USSR, and it collapsed on itself.

“I was wrong”, Parker said.  “It just isn’t technically feasible.  It took me two years but I’ve proven to myself  now, and to others, that SDI just won’t work.  But Reagan and his men don’t want to hear that.  We’re too far down the road, and there’s too much at stake.”

When President Reagan made the announcement about SDI, the “Star Wars” technology that was the entire foundation of SDI had yet to be totally proven out. In live-fire missile tests over the Pacific Ocean, there were just as many failures as success stories. Within the top secret laboratories of the defense department, there developed a major division between those that felt the technology was viable and those that felt it would never be technically feasible.

Over dinner that night, Parker told me all about how, over the years, he had become convinced that SDI simply was not ever going to work. He had become the leader of the handful of dissenting scientists who had finally, reluctantly, told the President that he was basing this huge political move on flawed science. As the voices of support for SDI grew stronger around the President, it was made increasingly clear to scientists like Parker how important this had become on the world stage, and how their strong dissenting opinions were no longer wanted.  Parker’s team was gradually shut out of the discussion, and some even mysteriously left the program, here one day and gone the next, never to be heard from again.

Parker’s quest for knowledge, and his obsession with proving out what he learned before he could ultimately put his own personal stamp of approval on something, had put him in the position of being on the opposite side of the fence from his own government’s leadership. One could only argue so much against powerful forces like these, regardless of how correct one’s position might be.

“It won’t work”, he told me, “and they know it now. But it’s too late. They are not going to change course, and I just can’t push it any further. They are sensing the Soviets are cowering from this, and the President and his men don’t want to hear from me anymore about this. In fact, I think I’m in a dangerous position. I think someone has been following me. Can you see how high the stakes are in this?”  His eyes nervously searched the room once again.

Parker, The Whiz Kid, died in a car wreck about two months after I saw him that night. The D.C. news reported it as just another tragic accident…one car, winding rural road, alcohol most likely involved, blood alcohol results pending. Then the story faded, just like all the other automobile accidents that year in the Washington area… move on, nothing to see here.

We ALWAYS believed Whiz Kid.  Always.