I often quarrelled with my teacher, Svanhildur, about the importance of knowing math. She repeatedly told me: “You’ll never achieve anything in life, Jón, if you don’t know math.”
I couldn’t care less. There was absolutely no purpose for it. I knew tons of adults who’d achieved all kinds of success without being good at math. My dad didn’t need math to be a cop. Mom didn’t have to know math to cook food at City Hospital.
“What will you do if you need to know the outcome of a mathematical problem?”
“I’ll ask someone.”
“What if there’s no one to ask?”
“Then I’ll ring someone who knows.”
“But if you’re not near a phone?”
“In the future, everyone will have their own phone.”
“That’s never going to happen!”
I was certain there’d be someone whose advice I could get. I didn’t need to worry about it. What I wanted to do in life didn’t require math. Mathematics is like catching salmon with your bare hands. Sometimes I went to Elliðaárvogur and tried to catch salmon from under the rocks. No matter how fast I snatched at them, they always eluded my grasp. Same with math. Why couldn’t I choose not to learn math? Einar never learned to ride a bike. He didn’t want to. No one cared. No one lectured him about the importance of knowing how to ride.
“Einar, you have to learn to ride a bike!”
“But I don’t want to.”
“But, Einar, you’ll never get anywhere in life except by bicycle. What will you do if you find yourself in mortal danger and have to get away lightning quick?”
“Then I’ll run.”
“But you’ll never run as fast as you could cycle!”
Einar had simply decided that in future he wasn’t going to ride a bike. He didn’t want to. And I didn’t want to learn math. That was that. No one could get me to learn it. Not even my mom. I thought it was too much trouble and lacking in goal or purpose. I had also learned from experience that math tended to get more difficult year on year the more you learned about it. I started by learning how to add. That was easy. Once I knew that, I started learning how to subtract, which is rather more complex and caused me quite a lot of hassle. For example, I had a really hard time learning how you take away a higher number from a lower number, like nine from seven. What about twenty-seven from twenty-nine? I worked damn hard learning how to do that; it cost me a great deal of effort. I was way behind my classmates. I’d barely begun to master minusing when multiplication came along. And then sets and decimal places and division and area. I realized it was all a conspiracy. They were trying to trick me into being someone I wasn’t, enticing me to do things I didn’t want to do and banning everything I liked. They were trying to change me. The only one who could stop them was me.
I set fire to my report card on school grounds. It wasn’t a judgment about me but about someone else. It was a judgment of a person they wanted me to be and confirmation that it hadn’t gone well. The report had nothing positive to say about me: just that I was always talking and disturbing others. I got “pass” in most things but “insufficient” in math. I was “good” in English. But I was the best in the class in English. I could speak AND read it. I was just bad at writing it. But that was the only thing they tested. Why is writing more important than talking? I don’t know. This report said nothing about me. They didn’t know me. They didn’t want to know me. They’d never seen me, not properly.
I also set fire to my schoolbooks. I tore them to pieces and threw them into the fire. I felt good seeing them burn. I relished the thought that I would never again have to sit and stare at those sleep-inducing books. I spat on my Danish grammar before I threw it on the fire. A crock of disgusting shit! Danish kids, too, are a bunch of annoying, hippie morons in clogs and overly baggy pants. I knew all the Danish I needed. I’d learned Danish from reading Donald Duck in Danish. He was the only Dane I needed to know.
My school bag went in the fire, too. I wasn’t going to carry it with me as a reminder. A group of giggling kids had gathered around the flames. I didn’t care. I didn’t know any of them. I didn’t want to know them. I didn’t want to know anyone at school, not even my old friends. We had nothing in common anymore. I’d never get where they were going. They saw me as an odd bird they had to pity. But they weren’t ever going to get where I was going. When Kári, the principal, came hurrying in my direction, I ran up the school stairs and shouted across the schoolyard:
We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers, leave them kids alone.
The principal was trampling on the fire.
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone.
Fat Dóri also failed everything. But that wasn’t so strange. He’d only just moved to the area. His mother and father were divorced. His mother had started a relationship with some new guy and had moved abroad with him. Dóri lived with his father, who was never around and didn’t care about him. He was almost always home alone. Except those times his grandmother came over and cooked for him. Because Dóri was fat, he was always being teased. He was called Little Blue after the blue elephant on children’s television. I was his only friend in school. Our friendship was based on our mutual exclusion. We hung around together after school, found solidarity in each other, and backed each other up in our anti-social sentiments: everyone is an idiot, people are dumbasses, school sucks. We didn’t find education worthwhile and made crank calls instead. We called old people and spoke English with them. Dóri was smart. He ripped the phone apart and connected it to a tape player so we could record our calls. I was quick at thinking up some nonsense or other to say to people, so I did the talking. Then we listened to the tapes and laughed ourselves silly. For example, one time I rang and this old woman answered.
“Hello. My name is Johnny Rotten, and I’m a punk rocker. Do you listen to Sex Pistols?”
“Forgive me, I can’t understand what you’re telling me.”
“My name is Johnny Rotten. Do you listen to the Sex Pistols?”
“I simply do not understand you. I’m going to ask my son to talk to you. He speaks English. [pause] There’s an Englishman on the phone. Would you talk to him?”
A young man comes to the phone.
“Hello.”
“Já, góðan daginn,” I said, having stopped speaking English right away. “Er Halldór heima?”
“No, no one called Halldór lives here.”
Then Dóri and I burst out laughing.
After my bonfire, I strolled home victorious. I went into my room. No one was home. Mom and Dad were at work. I had acquired an old turntable from Óli the Stud. I put Utangarðsmenn, the Icelandic punk “Outsiders,” on the record player and threw myself on my bed. I had several albums, like Polar Bear Blues and Radioactive. I’d also broken several of my albums, including Grease and ABBA’s Arrival. Disco shit. Brainless morons listened to Grease. ABBA was for aging housewives. Mom liked ABBA. She also really enjoyed Meatloaf. Sometimes, music videos were shown on television, and when Meatloaf sang “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” Mom looked seduced. Then she’d say:
“He’s repulsive, but he sings beautifully.”
Anyone who knew anything listened to Bubbi Morthens. He was awesome. Beyond that, I didn’t know much about music, less than most others. I just enjoyed this and that song. Mainly, I listened to the lyrics. After I listened to songs, I read the lyrics. I was usually more interested in the text than the music itself. It could be difficult; they were often in English. I didn’t understand all the words, but was determined to learn them.