1
O N WA R D ANDU P WA R D DEPT.
PENCILSDOWN!
M
idway through an introductory
session in the modest office of
Mighty Prep tutoring, in Studio City,
Los Angeles, Patrick Cunningham
handed a high-school junior, named
Jolie, a large packet of tea. “This is prep-
permint tea,” Cunningham said, profes-
sorially. He wore a pink polo with the
collar popped and bore a striking re-
semblance to a miniature Conan O’Brien.
“A private blend of peppermint,” he
added. “It’s nature’s Adderall.”
Jolie, who wore green jeans, Doc
Martens, and a look of mild confusion,
opened the packet and took a whiff. “Oh,
wow,” she said.
“Right!” Cunningham said. “It’s from
the Willamette Valley, in Oregon.”
Jolie had a 4.4 weighted G.P.A. at
a prestigious private high school, but
her most recent ACT score was in the
sixty-ninth percentile, a possible con-
cern for admittance to Amherst, one of
her target schools.
“What’s the point of it, though?” Jolie
asked about the tea.
“There is a modest but growing
amount of evidence that it will help you
concentrate,” Cunningham said.
Next, he presented Jolie with “a
test-scoring 100 pencil from the Mus-
grave Pencil Company, of Shelbyville,
Tennessee,” which, he explained, was
“developed in tandem with I.B.M. when
they were developing their scanning ma-
chine” that grades standardized tests.
(“The lead,” he said, “actually shows up
better than the No. 2.”) Finally, he
handed her some stickers bearing a car-
toon of his face. The daughter of the
Tears for Fears front man Curt Smith—
also a client—had designed them. (“I
don’t think my eyes are that far apart in
real life,” Cunningham noted, “but she
got the teeth.”)
“Rep the Prep!” he exhorted Jolie.
Cunningham is a thirty-seven-year-
old Princeton graduate and Marshall
Scholar, with graduate degrees in liter-
ature and filmmaking. He offers indi-vidual test prep for about three hundred
dollars per session—more than he earned
as a game-show writer when he first
moved to L.A. “It pays my mortgage,”
he said. “And I only work a few hours
most days.” He sees a couple of students
every day. “The kids of Coachella head-
liners,” he said. “Kids in baronial homes.
And the über-rich.” He “shared a fam-
ily,” he said, with Rick Singer, the or-
chestrator of this year’s college-admis-
sions scandal, which turned the actress
Felicity Huffman into a convicted felon.
“That’s the world I tutor in,” he said.
“The moms do the marketing for you.”
Jolie hoped to score a 30 on the ACT.
“I’ve met Nobel Prize winners,” Cun-
ningham told her. “I’ve never met a ge-
nius. I’ve just met hard workers.” She
nodded. Then Cunningham photo-
graphed her holding a small whiteboard
with the date, her name, and the mate-
rial covered that day. (“For my account-
ing assistant,” he explained).
The next afternoon, he was headed
to a palatial, “two Tesla” home, in Sher-
man Oaks, to meet with Jed, a junior at
another private high school. ( Jed also
has a tutor for A.P. chem.) Cunningham
tutored Jed’s older siblings, too. “The
family has paid me thousands,” he said.
It was algebra day, and the “eve of bat-
tle,” as Cunningham put it, for the De-
cember ACT. Wearing sweatpants and
a hoodie emblazoned with the name of
his school’s basketball team, Jed slumped
in the dining room, at a large table, his
Louis Vuitton key holder sitting beside
his pencils. On the walls hung an eclec-
tic collection of art work, including what
looked like a Picasso above the mantel.
Jed said that he thought his mother had
painted it. A visitor suggested otherwise.
“Mom!” Jed yelled up toward the sec-
ond floor. “Is this a Picasso?”
“What?” his mother yelled back down.
“Is this painting in here a Picasso?”
“Over the fireplace?”
“Yeah.”
Jed shrugged. He and Cunningham
continued his algebra lesson, under the
beatific gaze of Cunningham’s miniature
“test-prep Buddha.” Jed rushed through
a problem, and Cunningham clucked
that his mistakes were “due to executive
functioning.” Cunningham added, in a
singsong voice, “Before we cry, we ...”
“Simplify,” Jed said.
“If the ACT had a back tattoo of justdone with race in this country to shuffle
past all of the uncomfortable bits.”
Harris nodded. “Some people com-
partmentalize discomfort or don’t lean
into it,” he said. “The one time I did
move away from my discomfort, I really
regretted it. I’m a music freak, and I was
very talented at playing piano from age
five to eight. But I switched teachers, be-
cause the teacher was teaching me how
to play by ear. Then I had this older white
lady, and she wanted to teach me notes.
And she was mean. When it got too much
for me—the pressure of having to be
good—I quit.”
Wiley prodded him, like a therapist:
“Tell me more about that.”
“She always talked about how ‘lazy’
these fingers were,” Harris said, looking
at his hands. “I would go home and cry,
because I was, like, I can’t make my fingers
move faster! Even though you can—but
at eight years old I didn’t know that.”
“There’s something beautiful about
struggle,” Wiley said. “Just being able to
be bad at something.”
“What are you bad at?” Harris asked.
“Arguably—I’m going to say some-
thing that makes me feel uncomfort-
able—I’m bad at painting. But I’m good
at showing the parts that I’m good at.”
“That’s how I feel about writing,”
Harris said. “Do you remember the first
time I met you?” It was last year, Harris
reminded him, when a mutual friend
invited him to a party at Wiley’s apart-
ment, in SoHo, after the unveiling of
the Obama portrait. “Mickalene Thomas
gave me cake,” Harris recalled, starstruck.
“That’s right! The Obama cake!”
“I sort of fangirled and I asked you
about your art collection,” Harris said.
Wiley had thrown the party, he said, to
fill “an absence” of cool houseparties.
“What absence was in Times Square
that made you put your statue there?”
Harris asked.
Wiley said that he had conceived the
statue in Richmond, Virginia, where it
will be permanently housed, at the Vir-
ginia Museum of Fine Arts, beginning
in December. But “the opportunity
through the Times Square Alliance came
up,” he explained.“You get a chance to
see people from all corners of the globe
converging on this weird reaction to
American trauma writ large. It’s a little
surreal, as is Times Square.”
—Michael Schulman
THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019 23