There are a few highlights I recall as a very young kid. Most of them are memories of being told about them, but I have a few actual memories of the time. We were bouncing around as my dad finished his medical degree, and mom finished her masters in social work. I was told a story about a friend of mine named Scotty, from when we lived in columbus. He was apparently my best friend. After we moved away, the feds caught up with Scotty’s dad, who had kidnapped him across state lines after having his custody removed in divorce proceedings. Scotty’s dad killed his son and then himself. Apparently, after we moved to perry county ohio, I asked mom when I’d get to see scotty again. This broke her heart. I recall none of it. Before that, while mom was finishing up her master’s degree in michigan, my best friend there ran over me with a bike (it was an accident, no serious damage was done). I remember that as a fact, but do not remember it as an event. In perry county, my best friend accused me of rape. That one I remember. Vividly. I remember it the way one remembers an old injury that hurts every time the weather changes. So much of that is indelibly engraved on my brain. It’s odd how I didn’t remember it for years. I think ‘denied’ would be more accurate than ‘didn’t remember’. Regardless, forgive me if I ever come across as a little cynical about the title of ‘best friend’.
Yeah, I was the nerdy kid in high school, and was even more ostracized in elementary school. Never got beat up, but they didn’t have to, I found my place easy enough. In 5th grade, I joined the swim team, which took place far away, and was a welcome departure from home. It was in this time that I was first sexually assaulted by a stranger, and that I fooled around with the kid down the street, who falsely accused me of rape. It was strange in my last couple of years of elementary school at St Rose, when a girl with serious issues was enrolled in our class. I was suddenly not the object of all derision & scorn. I was the one picked next-to-last for a team. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. Even so, I was still being called ‘child molester’ on the playground.
My last year of elementary school was at St Nick’s. On some quasi-conscious level, I realized I was the new kid, that nobody knew me, and that I had the option of being someone else, in a different role. And on that same felt-but-not-understood level, it scared me. Maybe it was the idea of losing myself trying to fit in with others, maybe it was a belief that I deserved to be an outcast, or maybe it was just fear of the unknown. Whatever the psyochological root of it, I started acting weird. There is no surer route to being an outcast than to act differently. Walk fast down the hall. Talk about things that nobody else understands, not necessarily because they’re dumb, but because their interests are different. (
Rosecrans (high school) was like a continuation of st nick’s. The buildings are like 30 ft apart at most, so this is hardly surprising. The summer after freshman year, I went to boyscout camp and decided never to go back after getting into a fight with _everyone_ else at the camp about flagburning. Me: free speech. Them: disrespectful vandalism, and in a few cases, moral equivalent of a nationwide arson spree. There’s nothing special I remember from the summer before my junior year.
But the summer before my senior year, something different happened. I went away to a summer camp for the gifted. It gathered bright kids from all over ohio together for a week to hear lectures about what our futures could be, to take a look at this, that, and the other thing. The programming itself was mostly interesting, but not amazing. The contact with other smart kids, from very different places, with plenty of unstructured time to associate was like nothing I’d ever experienced in my life before that point. I get a little misty-eyed remembering it. It wasn’t all raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, but it was life in a barren wasteland.
The first day of it, in the evening, during unstructured time, I made a decision I have never regretted. At the beginning of the evening, I was hanging out with these people, operating by my usual, anti-social scripts. And they were reacting appropriately, by getting annoyed with me. I took a tactical retreat to my room. I started thinking about how these people who didn’t know me from adam were reacting to me, and what that meant. I did kata to calm myself (I had like 6 months of karate under my belt at that point). I confronted myself and laid out options for myself. I could continue to play the game by the same rules I was used to, and stay in the familiar place. Or I could change, and maybe end up in a better situation. I took the latter option. I went out a few minutes later, and kept quiet. I watched, I listened, and I learned more from my classmates in that one evening than I learned from the program in the entire week. I volunteered for our newsletter/yearbook committee. (Along with Beth Ciha, Akiva Holzer, Kimberly Rice, Carson Miller, and a homophobic chick whose name, I admit, I’ve forgotten. But for those of you who know me and my way with names, the fact that those names are burned into my brain should impress you.) I pulled my first all-nighter, came out to akiva, wrote and published terrible poetry. Had a little breakdown. Pulled myself back together and kept going*.
Everyone there present agreed that it was a great time and that the best part of it was the contact with our fellow students. One of my campmates came down with appendicitis (rapidly blamed on the enchiladas at the cafeteria) and was back, at the camp, in a wheelchair the day after his surgery. When it was over, I did _not_ want it to be over. When I got back home, for a few weeks afterwards, every couple of nights, I would climb up on the roof of our house, and howl like a dog. Mom never commented on the howling, but she told me not to go up on the roof, which I didn’t stop doing, even after she tried to hide the ladder.
My family went on our n-billionth trip to ocean city maryland shortly before the beginning of my senior year. Maybe it wasn’t ocean city, but it was some mid-atlantic sea side resort. Regardless, I was bored off my ass (at the time vacations were just another source of misery for me, generally speaking). I did sneak a surreptitious peek or thirty at some gay porn mags at some nearby store. But I decided that I would continue to forge a new path for myself in my senior year. I didn’t know how it would work out, but I would be less of a dick, while still not conforming. It didn’t seem like the world changed much. I think some people noticed the change, but most people didn’t seem to. Regardless, life was much better my senior year. The summer afterwards, I wasn’t on the swim team for the first year since I was 11. I eventually got a job as a night owl stock clerk at the local k-mart. I still had no friends, but it was okay. I remember one evening in the break room, people were sitting around chatting, someone cracked a lame joke, and I laughed. I doubled over laughing. I laughed in silent convulsions of my torso for a full minute. My supervisor said “I knew he’d crack sooner or later, but I never expected that.” I was a bad employee, but a brief one. And I had a respectable quantity of money for the first time in my life. Then came college, and that is a tale for another day.
*=So, when Rex chewed the back cover off that particular, irreplaceable document, covered with signatures from people I’ll likely never see again, there was a definite sense of loss, and some anger at the bunny. But he’s a bunny, what the hell else is he going to do? It’s not like it was the first thing of mine he chewed.
“Well, if you go back far enough, we’re all black, anyway.”
A frightening amount of this resonates with me. *hugs*