I once belonged to a club for “smart people.” I am no longer a part of that; I got stoopid. I now admit that I joined the club under false pretenses: I wanted to meet “smart guys.” It so happened that the smarter the guy, the weirder he turned out to be. My family exposure should have warned me about this in advance, but for some reason I did not take the hint. The weirdest guys I met there invited me to join a secretive club for “the top 2 percent of the top 2 percent.” They looked as if someone had been locking them in a dark closet all day…or all week, and only releasing them for this club meeting. They completely lacked social skills and may even have worn unmatched socks…and shoes.
One of the more personable club members was this guy called Harry: a fabulous storyteller. He used to introduce his long-suffering wife, Eunice, as “not MENSA material.” Eunice, a nurse-clinician who taught at one of the state colleges, maintained a perfect poker face.
Harry, trained as an engineer, was “too nervous to work.”
They used to leave the kids home during the summer and make cheap van trips to Mexico. Harry told us this great story: the two of them were sitting at a pulqueria in Coyoacán. This dive used to be patronized by Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Mr. and Mrs. Trotsky, all local residents.
The elderly waiter tottered over to Harry and Eunice, carrying little juice glasses of lukewarm pulque—a terrible but highly efficient poor man’s beverage—when he gasped, shrieked, dropped the tray, and ran headlong out the front door. He was never seen again.
Frida and Diego got Trotsky into Mexico; he was on the run from Stalin’s assassins. Trotsky, who popularized the concept of “permanent revolution,” was beginning to look more popular in Russia than its current leader.
The waiter thought Harry was Leon Trotsky returned from the grave. Stalin’s soldier had chopped his head off with a short axe. Harry had gray hair, a goatee, and a little moustache, and even wore the kind of wire-rimmed glasses favored by Russian intellectuals.—Kathryn Nocerino