Because I had started school in a foreign country I was a year younger than most of my classmates, and as a son of academics I was precocious as well. This served me well in middle school when I was still adjusting to American culture and I could retreat into my studies, but by the time I hit high school I was just a small, nerdy loner who didn't know how to spit or fight, two skills apparently essential to manhood in the USA.
I went from a small country school to an institution of thousands completely socially unprepared and unfamiliar with all the cultural touchstones, as my family did not 'believe in' TV. In a way this was perfect preparation for my future life as an outsider.
About halfway through my freshman year I realized that all the algebra, chemistry, and literature classes were ancillary to the real lesson I was supposed learn here. 'Conform or you will be bullied.' This had the opposite effect on me, and awakened my inner rebel. I refused to be cornered and I figured the best way to work the angles was to simply not show up to class.
When you go to school, but not to class, a whole new world opens up for you. A shadow world populated by stoners, perverts, and retards, not jocks and socialites. This was a world where maybe you could get laid by accident, without all the stupid games. It was also possible to be raped, or at least repeatedly scammed.
This was the school of hard knocks, the best school, and the one that made me who I am today. We would show up early, meeting in the smoking section, and take inventory of our pilfered goods from the night before. All was shared as we panned out across the landscape in the general direction of away from the compound-like classrooms and hallways.
Some would head up to the hills to steal marijuana crops, some of us would make out in sports equipment sheds, hiding in forts we had built from the gym mats. Still others would simply torture the resident narc all day, luring him out on long chases in his ridiculous golf cart.
This was my tribe, the punkers, misfits, and scrotes. Not the bettys and the barneys. Of course running with a bad crowd brings violence, and in order to survive you had to sub-sect. My crew was the gutter punks.
This was the 80's, before Hot Topic and the commercialization of punk, so you could still get bottles thrown at you daily for sporting a mohawk. Punkers were reviled by every group including other outcasts like the metal-heads, who teased their hair all day and wore make up, but still held you down and called you faggot while ritually punching you in the neck.
Survival meant running in a pack, which I hated, so me and my best friend would hide out off campus instead, engendering more cat calling and bottle throwing from the jocks as we slunk off from the lunch tables every day.
When my best friend turned into a junky and disappeared into that world, I discovered art, and the continuation school (name redacted to protect the innocent) I had ended up in had many free materials and no real adult supervision. In fact the school was so loose that the art teacher had been busted for selling mushrooms to her students and still kept her job.
This was ideal, I could show up to school frying on acid and just hang out by myself in the art barn, painting with expensive oils all day. And this is how I achieved my high school diploma. Perhaps through some deep seated academic guilt I still have nightmares that I have to go back and actually pass algebra, but I think just showing up for the last year of school was enough to get that stamp on my forehead. I do remember having to swallow some force fed American history about how Nixon was really a hero for opening up China, and we were made to watch the Columbia shuttle disaster live over and over again. But other than that it was all just a blur of swirling colors.
Needless to say this left me with no clear direction for my adult life, and as the youngest of six, my parents, over it, promptly kicked me out. I spent the next six months careening into homelessness and alcoholism, just trying to keep up with my peer group. We didn't know any other way to have fun. This was a very dark period of my life, pregnant with many cautionary tales, but the result was that by the end of that winter I was the most haggard sixteen year old you ever met. While other kids my age were busy getting laid I was hanging out under bridges with people you wouldn't want to touch with a rubber glove on. I had played around with some girls in school but had never been with a woman.
All of that was about to change...
