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i was a pretty good kid, all things considered--throughout my adolescence, i pretty much stayed away from drugs, alcohol and crime. my biggest vice during those years (aside from the pack-a-day habit) was skipping school, which i did with great frequency and expertise.
seriously, from my sophomore year on i don't think i ever made it five days in a row; three days one week and two the next was more like it. this was back when i could sleep for sixteen hours at a stretch, oblivious to everything around me--and that's what i did more often than not.
and my mother tried, she really did--she'd come in every morning and try to get me up, but i'd always wait her out, knowing that sooner or later she'd have to give up and go to work.
and then there were the days i'd actually manage to drag my ass upright, drive to school, interpret not being able to find just the right parking space as permission from god to home and crawl back into bed.
either way, at around ten ms. vesey from the school would invariably call my mom and ask, "what's it gonna be today, ms. f?" and my mom would give her the excuse du jour--flu, sore throat, whatever--and i'd sleep until two and that'd be pretty much it.
how did i get away with it, you ask? it's like this: a smart kid, i learned early to differentiate myself from the typical juvenile delinquent by making sure that when i actually did show up at school, i was always well-behaved, ingratiating and brilliant. thus, i not only maintained at least a 3.6 gpa throughout my high school career, i also endeared myself to my teachers--and, more importantly, to the all-important office staff who held my fate in their hands.
the more interesting question, of course, is why i did it. my mother didn't understand it, my friends didn't understand it, my school didn't understand it and i didn't understand it either--at least, not then. i see it now, though--i was suffering from unrequited grief, unrequited love, the whole gay thing; in other words, i was clinically depressed.
so i chose to disengage, and i started with school. and it wasn't because school was so awful; it was because school happened to start in the morning.
see, mornings were the worst--from adolescence onward, i spent the first three hours of every day of my life more or less wishing i was dead. and because awakening was the moment of maximum pain, i postponed it as long as i could. my mood would eventually improve as the day wore on, until by nighttime i was feeling pretty good and would then put off going to bed as long as i could, thus setting myself up to repeat the cycle--a pattern which plagues me to this day.
whatever--back to our story.
by senior year i'm something of a legend among students and faculty alike. but sooner or later, all winning streaks have to come to an end.
for me, it happened like this: ms. vesey calls me into the office sometime around early march, settles me into my usual seat and, with sincere regret (since in spite of herself she has grown fond of me), solemnly informs me that, at this early date, i've already managed to miss half the total days of the school year (an unprecedented feat at that time by anyone with a still-passing grade, btw, and a record i'd be willing to bet still stands).
she then delivers the coup de grace: if i miss one more day, then--no matter how good my grades are--i won't graduate.
i remember taking the blow, absorbing its meaning, shaking it off, squaring my shoulders, looking her in the eye and replying, "well, ms. vesey, i guess that means i'll just have to show up every day from now until june."
well, you'da thought i'd uttered the funniest line in the history of the universe the way that office reacted to this pronouncement--i'm talking grim, forbidding women who to my knowledge had never even cracked a smile in a student's presence suddenly doubled over in incredulous laughter.
but by god, i showed those bitches. those last lazy hazy crazy days of my senior year--when even the goody-goods were bailing and partying at the lake--i made it to school every god damn day.
funny what you can do when you know you don't have a choice.
[and my second-biggest adolescent vice? car accidents. we'll talk about that next time.]
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6 comments:
The irony of the story is that just when everyone else was slacking off and enjoying themselves, you had to actually had to walk the straight and narrow.
You were ahead of your time.
Then you went off to college where no one takes attendance and what happened then? Did you bail out of class or simply never schedule a class before noon?
My first semester of college, I had an 8 a.m. MWF calculus course assigned to me all the way across campus. It was a long walk and, as the temperature dipped, it also became a very cold walk.
The professor, Aman Pillay, was Indian and spoke with an accent. He also passed out a sheet where you were supposed to check off your name to show you were in attendance. One day he commented that there were only 12 people in class, but 18 names checked off.
I sitting next to a young woman one day. We had just gotten back the mid-term. She was disappointed in her A-...but probably not as disappointed as I was in my C.
She commented that Professor Pillay was wearing the "sweater." She then opened up a page to her notes and put down another mark where it said "sweater." Apparently, with the semester half over, Professor Pillay had managed to wear the exact same sweater 13 times. He was batting over half.
I ended up with a B in the course and an aversion myself to early morning classes.
Interesting how different some of our reactions to being different are. I missed a few days here and there in elementary school and in the beginning of junior high. Then I figured out I was queer and that lots of kids would hate me if they knew. So without telling anyone, I resolved to beat them at everything: grades, sports, attendance. The only time I missed class was if I was at some school event (like a biology field trip or a swimming championship), so I really never missed a day in high school. I learned later that a troublesome cough at the end of my senior year was walking pneumonia, and I still kept right on at class, surreptitiously sucking down cough drops during AP exams and finals and the first two months of Summer vacation.
The came college and coming out of the closet, which is when you get your true personality out of hock. I remember being sick and suddenly thinking, "You can miss a day now."
I've got a high school reunion coming up; I refuse to go, but I somehow wonder if anybody there would recognize the much more relaxed person I've become.
noblesavage: my first two years of college were spent at a local junior college (the same one my mother and father attended, actually). while i expected it to be a walk in the park, the reality was quite different: all the professors were ph.d's, and they actually taught their own (relatively small) classes--a distinction i didn't really appreciate until i got to the big state school and found out how rare that was. as a result, the curriculum was demanding and the instruction was excellent. oh, and they also took attendance--three unexplained absences and you were out of the class for the semester. so, yeah--all of my classes were scheduled in the afternoon ;)
and calculus at 8 am after a long walk on an indiana winter morning? you have my respect.
hubbard: i would say that your coping mechanism beat the hell outta mine.
as much as i'd love to say that if i had it to do over again i'd do it differently, i dunno that that's true--if i'd gotten the therapy i really needed early, possibly. but that wasn't so easy to come by in that time and place, when, if something bad happened, you were just supposed to gut up, be a man and move on.
a question, tho--does the fact that you won't be attending your h.s. reunion mean that, despite your full engagement and level of participation (which awes me, btw--you have no idea), you have no good memories of those years?
It's not so much that I have no good memories--I have a handful--it's just that I feel no need to see those people. I've kept in touch with only one person I knew in high school, and that was because she's the sister I never had, and we've been friends since first grade (our families still celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas together). I made several friends in high school, but when I came out to them after we'd graduated, they all stopped talking to me. To hell with that reunion.
MKF,
Don't be so sure that the therapy you didn't get would have helped. If they had tried to "change" you, that would have been infinately worse than what you went through.
hubbard: hmm...i guess your initial instincts were right after all.
blindman: i wasn't talking so much about therapy for being gay (in fact, i saw a therapist when i was 16 and was too freaked by the whole gay thing to even bring it up). i had a bunch of people die on me starting at age 10 and, instead of learning to deal with the grief, i turned it inward instead-and lemme tell you, that'll fuck you up. also, i think something went really wrong hormonally when puberty hit--all of a sudden, my mood and energy level went to hell and stayed that way. an endocrinologist might've been a good idea, but who knew back then?
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