The biggest problem I’ve had with growing up, is realizing
how much of what I thought was normal isn’t.
My first Christmas with my wife’s family; reunions; relationships;
bullying. I had lived half my life under
one impression of how things were supposed to be, only to – still – be learning
individual experiences may vary.
I believe it was my ninth grade year that I left my Walkman in
the car on the way to school. Emmanuel
Baptist Academy was part of neighboring school district, but not their transit
system. So, a suburban would show up at
my house every day and drive me to the district limits. From there, I’d carpool with one of the school’s educators, as pastor from a
nearby church.
And yes, I had a cassette player. I’d had a mixtape of Alanis Morisette – not the
big, famous ones: lesser tracks like ‘Not the Doctor’, and ‘The Couch.’ This was around the time my teen angst phase
(all eleven months of it) was fizzling out.
The fact that I was listening to Alanis like a honey badger
is surprisingly tame, given my music exposure in the six months I’d been at
that school. Within three days, one
student leant me her CD of Sublime, which I popped in my SegaCD, rerouted the
audio from my TV into my boombox recorder head, and dubbed to cassette. This would be done for my first real exposure
to Nirvana, with their unplugged MTV session.
To this point, I already had a good classic rock exposure, having built
up my eight-track collection of Deep Purple, Led Zepplin, David Bowie, Beatles,
and Pink Floyd.
Yes. Eight-tracks
were outdated even by my era. That was
why I thought it was so asinine and wonderful.
I would frequently find obsolete equipment and juryrig it into other
components simply to make one central piece that worked like a newer item. Take this:
I had a speaker, a milk crate, cassette deck, handful of wires, and a
chord organ that made no noise. I
affixed the speaker to the milk crate, rigged up the chord organ’s speaker
rotors above that, and wired the main board of the cassette recorder and such
through the crate. Voila: Boombox. Pretty effing good one, too. I even sprayed it in silver glitter spray
paint.
I was such a renegade graffiti artist.
It was the end of my first week at that school when I was
introduced to Marilyn Manson. The irony
will never elude me: outside of the school, I didn’t know who the hell this guy
was; Once I go to a Baptist academy, I realize this guy is the demagogue of
their underground couture. Yet, after of
all that, I get busted with Alanis Morissette.
The lecture was priceless.
I was pulled out of my science class (learning how man developed brass
and iron over 12,000 years…), and was set in the principal’s office. I was then forced to go through how secular
music would inhibit more moral capabilities, blah blah blah. The youngest teacher in the school was
brought in to tell me how he really liked U2’s ‘Joshua Tree’, because it had
such an uplifting message, and this Alanis woman had nothing more desirous than
to bring down the very nature of Christianity.
At least he was half-right.
Two things: ‘Joshua Tree’ was not
an inspirational album. Matter of fact,
by ’98, it was barely a relevant
album. Most of the album is spent remarking
how amazed they were with how oblivious Americans are. Second: this is a phenomenal ‘Pop’ pastoral
technique: Talk to the ‘kids’ about things like ‘The Matrix’ and ‘U2’ and their
‘Led Zepplin’ like you understand them.
Once you have that relatable hook, try to persuade them to see your
vantage. I’m not going to say coerce, because
a strong enough mind can resist it, but, well… the thought’s there.
They keep my cassette, calling my mother in for a talk about
it. In the car on the way home, she pops
it in the car stereo before she says a word.
Five minutes later, she’s laughing over how stupid they were and stops
for pizza.
This was, of course, because she had heard me playing the
other music I’d brought home. I was
their effigy; their burning man. They
were smoking out the wrong rat.
Speaking of which: this was the first school I ever smoked
inside of. Remember how small I said it
was? I mean, we’re barely talking 2200
square feet. One bathroom for each sex from
end to end. And one afternoon, on a very
long day, I wanted nothing more than a cigarette, and, was offered a lit one
right there in the bathroom. Keeping in
mind, despite being transferred, my smoking habit stayed with me until I was
around twenty.
The summer preceding this – and I think what caused all the
drama – there was a magnificent party.
It was in the middle of Dundee or Wayne, New York, and there was so much
noise. I had never heard of Rage Against
the Machine before that night, and it would forever cull up memories of
teenagers etching crude tattoos of a giant salmon one another’s leg. There was an enormous trampling, which I
would use to simultaneously break three toes and another girl’s nose. Late in the evening, why, even the Pastor from
the school showed up.
Let me tell you the shitstorm that caused. We were mostly supervised, but he still
barged right into the house of the kid’s parents like he owned the place. As he was not invited in, they turned a
shotgun on him. He demanded to know who
was responsible for the eternal souls of all those impressionable youths. We heard the shotgun prime, and he was in his
car five seconds later peeling away.
This did not go – it would seem – to his plan. The start of my ninth grade year, new forms
were sent home, giving the Pastor the right to inspect a student’s home and to
make it his personal right to follow up on their moral upbringing. Inside my home, this created a hurricane of
Floridian proportions in protest.
Ultimately, unless she transferred me back to public school, she relegated
against sending me back to public school.
So, I was the first man on fire for the sake of their
enforcement. Secular music, unkempt
hair, and I was allowed to watch ‘R’ rated movies, why- I was a right proper
malcontent. I tried to keep up a better
presentation after that – joining the basketball team, and the soccer
team.
And then, one lovely spring afternoon, they walked in on me
and my girlfriend snogging. Oh, I tried
to come up with some stupid ass story, but, I was wearing her lipstick, so that
went out the window. Fortunately, I was
a ‘problem’ case, so she wasn’t penalized.
I was suspended for three days. I
wrote a quick ‘note’ on the grease board before leaving. That night, my mother received a call about
it, and was informed I’d be suspended into the next week. She found the whole thing hilarious, and was
proud of her genius little boy. The
message?-
“Dear educators,
Albeit reticent, do understand my behavior shouldn’t have interrupted
this school.
Sorry,
Chris.”
Do you see it?- the little hidden bits? I guess they were actually feeling sorry for
me, until they realized it read ‘Dear Dumb Shits. Sorry. Chris’.
If I was a renegade kid, I did so intelligently, at least.
Much this past week, I learned a lot in those weeks off from
school. Hell, I did a lot. I painted a house
one time. Another, I created a
wall-mounted turntable out of an old, broken RCA turntable- got it working and
everything. At one point, I sat in a
rocking chair in my room for seven hours as I beat Wario Land on the
VirtualBoy, while I had the contraption literally belted onto my face, with the
audio wired out into giant speakers that I kicked over to face me. Seven hours, folks. My eyes were like a monitor with image
retention issues for two days after that.
I also learned a lot about manipulating DOS and windows 95 – a skill that
would get me suspended again. In Rome, I
used a school terminal daily. I had
created my own Admin account, reserved and encrypted a chunk of the drive for
personal use. I frequently would use
their internet to hunt down nude pictures in a 16-bit greyscale. I’d print them out, and use them as references
for my drawing. Seriously, too. They actually creeped me out a bit: most of
the models were posed in a manner that translated well to my drawings, but were
so vacuous that it was art for me, and not anything else. To make sure I didn’t lose track of the image
files, I’d save them into my space on the networked drive.
So, fun story: the school converted over to a purely
electronic grading system in my junior year.
They actually created and established this lovely IT department. One day while poking around (alright,
bombarding), I made it into the school records and may or may not have
manipulated roughly a dozen records for myself and close friends. They saw the user access, and followed it
through a remote spoof looped out of Australia.
In tracing it, they found the fault inside the school’s IP, and on
checking the complete student space for the breach (which they never did find),
they found my lovely little hideaway. No
one to nail the hack on, but I was suspended for violating the network’s TOS
(terms of service). As far as the rest,
all I have to say is: I passed Algebra finally.
What’s the great takeaway here? We all have our own little drummer, and we
all think ours has the best beat. Don’t
be afraid to hear someone else’s song, but don’t be afraid to fall in line with
your own. After all, no one will ever be
able to dance to your song the way that you do.
