Dino apparently wasn’t an ‘A’ student, if that surprises anyone. Mr. Tosches takes off on a wonderful riff to explicate this basic fact, and I will keep it all. One only has to know that Dino’s brother, William, was the more bookish sort.
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Dino, however, wanted none of it. An apple was not a handful of letters or a dumb-ass drawing in a moldy old book. An apple was something you ate. Spelling it had nothing to do with it. His father called it a mela. His teacher called it an apple. Sometimes his father called it that too, except it came out un appla. Whatever you called it, however you spelled it, it was all the same. The Antonucci brothers, who sold the damn things, likely could not spell them. Neither probably could the farmers who grew them. You could grow them, you could buy them, you could swipe them; but spelling them got you nowhere. Let William do the spelling. He himself would tend to the eating.
He did reluctantly learn the spelling end of things, as to not learn it only meant getting left back and not-learning it over and over again, which could only be more insufferable than learning it and forgetting it and moving on. And so it went, straight through to where you were not only spelling the apple but the worm that was in it; straight through to where you were plussing one apple with another and coming up with two, then dividing the two by two and coming up with the one again. It got to where when the nun at Sunday school started talk about Adam and Eve and the apple, he saw that apple as the one that had started all this spelling and adding and subtracting and dividing. He saw that as the sin, as the downfall. God had told them to eat whatever they wanted, but not that apple from the tree of knowledge. But, no, they were not satisfied just to eat; they wanted knowledge, those fools, wanted not just to eat but to spell what they ate, to divide it and add it and subtract it too. That was the original sin. And he was still paying for it, with all this spelling and arithmeticking five days a week, with all this Sunday-morning apple-talk to boot. That whole business back there in the Garden had so displeased God that he had transformed Eve’s kind into a race of mothers, Mullimans, and nuns; had consigned Adam’s kind to forever suffer under them; had made it hard to bite into an apple without tasting the bitterness of letters and plus signs and minus signs. It was horrible really, when you thought about it, enough to shake your faith.
-- Nick Tosches, “Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams”
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