Like early ’90s Aerosmith, I was ready to make my return to the real world when I was finally allowed to go back to a public school.
In the fall of 1996 I had finally won the freedom I’d been fighting for since third grade. After what turned out to be a failed experiment in evangelical indoctrination, my family gave up on the idea that I should be shaped by moralizing zealots pretending to be teachers. Not that they had much of a choice, I’d been “asked to leave.” Supposedly a favor: no official expulsion, just a quiet exit. The official reason was that I was playing blackjack before school, but the truth was I got snitched on not for playing, but for winning. Separating the rich kids from the money that their wealthy, indifferent parents bestowed on them, for lunch or just as an easy replacement for attention and nurturing, became the only highlight of my sixth grade experience. Two years of walking around the playground by myself, trying to come up with an escape plan, had never yielded the obvious exit route: vice. For the remainder of the school year, I was home-schooled. The experience shaped my life because my mom introduced me to poetry, and on top of that, I actually started learning things like math, history, and science. It was decided I’d be able to return to public school in the fall. Not having to shell out a few thousand dollars, then sit through a beg-a-thon for whatever was left in their bank account, probably helped tilt the scales in my favor.
All summer long, I was running around with a friend who was also making the jump back into the wilds of public school. We drifted through the days, got mixed up in the kind of stuff kids stumble into on the last leg of childhood before nosediving into teen angst, and we were both discovering music that would become the soundtrack for everything we didn’t yet have words for. For him, it was Deftones and a bunch of other skater punk that felt too modern for me. Since I was ten, I’d been a huge fan of Aerosmith. More than that, my Dad was a huge fan – so I was a huge fan by proxy – but that summer, I took it to a whole other level. Pump (Geffen Records, 1989) and Get a Grip (Geffen Records, 1993) were already lifted from his collection to start my own, but by the time school came around, I had picked up Permanent Vacation (Geffen Records, 1987) at a gas station with some birthday money. It was the first in the trilogy of their comeback albums, and I felt a connection to that desperate, all-or-nothing rock they were going for. After the failings of their last effort, this was a make-or-break moment that paid off and set them on a path to legendary status by the time ’96 came around. They were a staple of the MTV ’90s era and had just come off a huge world tour.
As I was picking up weights for the first time, my headphones with the coiled cord and quarter-inch jack were blasting Permanent Vacation nonstop. There’s a certain kind of forgiveness that fans like myself, who discovered Aerosmith backwards, extend to their power ballads like “Angel,” but the deeper I dug into the back catalog, the more I understood why diehard fans like my dad merely tolerated them – and that was only if they had a killer music video. But the campiness of the first album in their “comeback trilogy” was too much to be included in my dad’s music collection. You could see how Steven Tyler, starting to write songs with the likes of Desmond Child, was edging out their personas made famous by their monikers: the Toxic Twins. By the time I was heading into seventh grade, Aerosmith was a mainstream pop band. While deeply rooted in the dirty, bluesy rocks of the ’70s, they were willing to adapt to a new world of MTV and song-request-infested FM radio stations.
Walking into that huge school was more than just a culture shock for me. To this day, I have recurring dreams about running around those halls trying to find my next class: a feeling alien to a kid coming from a school where the entire sixth grade could fit on a single school bus. Eventually, I found some kids who were not yet accepted into any of the other popular groups, while the one kid I did know in the entire school, who had made the jump with me from private school, was an honorary member of the skaters due to his ability to… well, skate.
Once I got the class schedule figured out, I was also exposed to the wide and wacky spectrum of public school teachers. My favorite one, for social studies, was overjoyed at calling out Bill Clinton’s neoliberalist bullshit, while making fun of Bob Dole – not for having the personality of a sentient ottoman, but for his awful track record in the Senate. He also steered clear of the obvious ear-related mocking of Perot, while being legitimately dismayed by our class electing him for what he referred to as “a national non-starter.” He expanded on this at length, explaining how Perot would never garner the support needed from either body of Congress, and us putting our mock faith in a third-party candidate showed why we couldn’t be trusted to vote for leaders. That teacher was really great, except for the time he literally threw a stapler at a kid who was sleeping in his class. Like, full-on launched it at the kid. I have no idea why it wasn’t a big deal, or why he didn’t get fired, but he seemed a lot more jaded after that incident either way.
Another interesting situation came from a day in our biology class when we had a substitute teacher come in. Most of the time with a sub, especially that early in the year, nobody knows them and they’re just given hell because that’s what middle schoolers do. But this sub was different for me in particular, because she was my 3rd-grade teacher from the Christian private school I had left. Seeing her go through the lesson, discussing the evolution of frogs or some shit, left me in a state of total disbelief: this lady did actually know how to teach based on reality and not some creationistic nonsense. The same woman, who was my full-time teacher for the entire year of 3rd grade, did absolutely nothing to acknowledge that she knew who I was. It was like she was obligated to keep this side of her brain, the one that taught a curriculum based on facts, separate from the Bible-story-driven lessons I was inundated with.
Armed with the love ballad “Angel” in my Discman, I proceeded to fall in love a dozen times a day. As a teenager going from a small pool of girls to a sea of them, my head spun in different directions each time the bell rang. In each class, there was at least one girl who I’d make sure to talk to and get to know, and though I was still a bit shy, I had a weapon in my arsenal few boys of that day and age were brave enough to employ: poetry. My big plan was to show this skill off in my English class, but those plans were derailed by what was becoming abundantly clear as the school days plodded on: the kids here were not all right.
They were cool, they certainly possessed social skills beyond my own, but I knew what a noun was – the only one in my English class who did. It is damn near impossible to write a love poem for a girl who can’t read, and it limits your vocabulary to single syllables. Not only that, but I was not – nor have I ever been – a practitioner of rhyming poems. It wasn’t that I thought they weren’t interesting, but to me they reminded me too much of childish things like Shel Silverstein or nursery rhymes. And to the illiterate, poetry was supposed to rhyme, or else it was just a smorgasbord of words flopped down on a piece of lined paper like some madman. Now, I’m quite sure that in the AP classes there were some pretty smart kids, but the problem with a system like that is that some kids get the accelerated experience while the rest get pushed up and out of high school. For students like myself, who fell very much in the middle of those two extremes, we either sank in the harder classes or floated with the rest of the chum.
They were cool, they certainly possessed social skills beyond my own, but I knew what a noun was – the only one in my English class who did.
Halfway through the school year, a friend invited me to a lock-in at my old school. Why I was allowed to attend, or why I would agree to voluntarily lock myself into a school I had spent years trying to escape, goes to show how disenchanted I had become with the outside world. At least in that cage I was somebody. I was the opposition – the kid who wore black every day and would argue with the Bible teacher until the bell rang. It was something I had found that I needed. Even today, I work best when I have barely any time.
There was a time in my adult life when I worked at a coffee shop at the break of dawn, came home in the afternoon to sleep for an hour, before going to my night job at a steakhouse. During that time, I wrote thousands of poems, dozens of stories, and somewhere in that grind, I squeezed out every ounce of creativity I had in my body.
So, like I am almost always predisposed to do, I took my own path that led back into the belly of the beast. I’d spend the next few years there, growing despite the constant friction from sadistic teachers, administrators who despised me, and a few teachers that took pity on me enough to let me sleep through their class until I drifted away; a truant wanderer destined to drown in the muck and mire of low-wage jobs and one poem after another.
Sometimes in life, the place you think you’re going to fit into can be too comfortable of a fit. Sometimes where you want to be and where you’re going are two separate things that only merge much later in life. It’s impossible to have regrets about your choices when you’re grateful to be where you are in this moment right now.
