Jonny Magic And the Card Shark Kids

1. DAWN OF THE DORK "Yo no soy marinero! Yo no soy marinero! Soy capitan! Soy capitan! Soy capitan! Bamba bamba! Bamba bamba! Bamba bamba!" Fourteen-year-old Jon Finkel rocked inside his Lilliputian chair in the back of the classroom, singing at the top of his lungs. As his gelatinous body swayed, his bottom roll of stomach fat bulged under the desk's Juicy Fruit stalactites. A black stained Phillies T-shirt flapped over his loose jeans. His long tangled hair curled like a roller coaster into what he affectionately termed his "Jewfro." An enormous pair of square glasses slipped down a long, large nose that bent in the middle like it was perpetually ducking a punch. His eyes were two frantic bugs sealed in novelty ice cubes. As he hit the last note of the song, he pushed his glasses back into place and raised his flabby arms in the air with a triumphant "Hey!" But no applause came. This wasn't music class. It was geography. And by the looks of the bored, pencil-chewing students around him, this strange and unprovoked burst of song was nothing unusual. Finkel, the biggest loser in school, was just being Finkel again. In the social hierarchy of eighth grade at Park Middle School in Fanwood, New Jersey, in 1992, Finkel was anything but a high roller. Here, as in most schools, there were two ways for a boy to be an outcast. You could be smart. Or you could be weird. If you were dumb and normal, that was fine, particularly if you could hit a ball far with a stick. Finkel embodied the worst of both worlds: he was both smart and weird. Naturally, the kids hated him. Finkel's unique and stubborn smarts ran in the family. His dad, Mark, a computer analyst, was a headstrong and liberal math nerd who made a career out of speaking his mind. While working as a cryptographer for the National Security Agency, he spoke out loudly against the Vietnam war. When he lost his security clearance for smoking pot, he got drafted-only to declare himself a conscientious objector. While

David Kushner is the author of Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture. His work has appeared in numerous publications including Rolling Stone, Wired, Spin, Salon, and The New York Times. He lives in New Jersey. Visit his website at www.davidkushner.com.

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