J e r r y s p I n e L l I

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15 . Discovered 
In fourth grade Zinkoff is discovered. 
He has been there all along, of course, in the 
neighborhood, in the school, for ten years. He is 
already known as the kid who laughs too much 
and, until his operation, the kid who throws up. 
In fact, in order to get himself discovered, 
Zinkoff does not do a single thing he hasn’t 
already done a thousand times. 
As with all discoveries, it is the eye and not 
the object that changes. 
The discovery of Zinkoff, which will take 
place gradually over the course of the year, 
begins on the first day of school. The teacher is 
Mr. Yalowitz. He is the class’s first man teacher. 
Mr. Yalowitz stands up front holding the stack of 
roll cards. He looks carefully at each card, as if he 
is memorizing every name. Then he begins to 
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shuffle the cards, rearranging their places in the 
stack. When he finishes he puts the stack down. 
He lifts off the top card. “Zinkoff,” he says, his 
eyes never leaving the card. “Donald Zinkoff. 
Where are you?” 
Zinkoff, knowing by now where he belongs, 
has already gone straight to the boondocks: last 
seat, far corner. He jumps to attention. “Here, 
sir!” he calls out. 
A smile crosses the teacher’s face. He looks 
up. “Zinkoff . . . Zinkoff . . . You want to know 
something, Zinkoff?” 
“Yes, sir!” 
“You’re the first Z I’ve ever had in my class. 
It’s not easy being a Z, is it, Zzzzinkoff?” 
To tell the truth, Zinkoff has never thought 
much about it. “I don’t know, sir.” 
“Well, it’s not easy, take my word for it. I was 
a Y. Always the last seat in the class. Always the 
last one in line for this or that. Doomed by the 
alphabet. What do you think about that, 
Zinkoff?” 
Zinkoff doesn’t know what to think about 
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that, and he says so. As for the rest of the class, 
they’re thinking, So this is fourth grade. They 
don’t know if it’s being one more grade up, or if 
it’s this man teacher with his gruff man way of 
talking, but they’re liking it and starting to feel 
pretty puffy about themselves. 
The teacher points. “Zinkoff, how’d you like 
to experience life in the first row?” 
Zinkoff’s eyes boggle. 
The teacher waves grandly. “Come on up 
here, boy!” 
Zinkoff cries out “Yahoo!” and races up front. 
By the time the teacher is done, Zinkoff is in 
seat number one and Rachel Abano is in the 
boondocks. Joining Zinkoff on the front row are 
a W, a V and two T’s. 
Thanks to teacher Yalowitz, the first person to 
discover Zinkoff is Zinkoff. Unlike his teachers in 
grades two and three, this one seems delighted 
with him. He is forever making pronounce-
ments that give Zinkoff new views of himself. 
Every morning the first week, for example, as 
soon as Zinkoff enters the classroom, the teacher 
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proclaims, “And the Z shall be first!” 
One day as he arrives for work at 7:30 
A
.
M
., 
the teacher spots Zinkoff, alone on the play-
ground, coming down the sliding board. He calls 
out, “You’ll be early to your own funeral, boy!” 
Like Zinkoff’s previous teachers, Mr. 
Yalowitz notes his atrocious handwriting. 
“Master Z,” he says, “whenever you put pencil to 
paper, unspeakable things happen.” Unlike the 
other teachers, he says this while laughing, and 
adds, “Thank God for keyboards!” 
Mr. Yalowitz is fussy about his greenboard. 
Every Friday at precisely two thirty in the after-
noon he washes his greenboard. For this purpose 
he keeps a bucket and sponge in the book-and-
supply closet. 
On a Friday afternoon in November Mr. 
Yalowitz is called away from class. By the time he 
gets back it is well past two thirty. Zinkoff is up 
front, standing on a chair, reaching for the high-
est part of the greenboard with the wet sponge. 
Mr. Yalowitz gives a chuckle. “Independent 
little critter, aren’t you?” 
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Zinkoff isn’t sure if his teacher’s remark is a 
statement or a question, nor does he quite under-
stand what it means. But he likes the sound of it 
and decides it must be good, whatever it is. He 
looks down at the teacher and beams. “Yes sir!” 
The teacher makes himself comfortable while 
his student finishes the job. When Zinkoff 
returns to his front-row seat, the class applauds. 
Someone even whistles. 
By placing Zinkoff up front, by spotlighting 
Zinkoff with clever remarks, Mr. Yalowitz unwit-
tingly hastens the others’ discovery of him. 
Something else hastens that discovery too: new 
eyes. 
By the end of third grade, most of the kids’ 
baby teeth were gone. The permanent ones had 
arrived in their mouths. Around fourth grade 
something similar happens with eyes. The baby 
eyes don’t drop out, nor are there eye fairies 
around to leave quarters under pillows, but new 
eyes do arrive nevertheless. Big-kid eyes replace 
little-kid eyes. 
Little-kid eyes are scoopers. They just scoop 
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up everything they see and swallow it whole, no 
questions asked. Big-kid eyes are picky. They 
notice things that the little-kid eyes never both-
ered with: the way a teacher blows her nose, the 
way a kid dresses or pronounces a word. 
Twenty-seven classmates now turn their new 
big-kid eyes to Zinkoff, and suddenly they see 
things they haven’t seen before. Zinkoff has 
always been clumsy, but now they notice. Zinkoff 
has always been messy and atrocious and too 
early and giggly and slow and more often than 
not wrong in his answers. But now they notice. 
They notice the stars on his shirts and his atro-
cious hair and his atrocious way of walking and 
the atrocious way he volunteers for everything. 
They notice it all. Even the dime-sized birth-
mark on his neck below his right earlobe. It has 
been there for ten years, but now they notice and 
they stare and say, “What’s that?” 
When the teacher returns graded papers, they 
peek over Zinkoff’s shoulder and see that he 
never gets an A. When the music teacher comes 
and demonstrates instruments and passes out 
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sheets to sign up for lessons and orchestra, they 
peek again and see that the silly goose signed up 
for all eight instruments. 
Those who practice with him in the school 
orchestra notice that he is given the “thunder 
drum,” as the teacher calls it. They notice that 
every time he pounds the drum he is three beats 
early or three beats late, and they wince and roll 
their big-kid eyes at each other and scowl at the 
teacher as if to say, Do something. 
And she does something. She gives him a 
flute, the least damaging instrument. Still he 
often veers off course, a wanderer among the 
clarinets and violins. The orchestra kids tell the 
rest of the kids, the rest of the kids tell their par-
ents, and when the chorus and orchestra recital 
takes place that spring nearly everyone in the 
audience keeps an ear peeled for the lost, solitary 
squeak of Zinkoff’s flute. 
It is in the first week of June of that year that 
Zinkoff is most profoundly discovered. It hap-
pens during Field Day.