Schools Out Forever
By the 9th grade I desperately wanted out of school. I remember seeing public service cartoons about people who left school too early. They went on to exciting careers sweeping out the local mom & pop grocery store. That wasn't what I had in mind. I wanted to cut to the chase and go on to college.
(Warning: unseemly levels of self-esteem ahead.)
It took me a couple of weeks to read through my Algebra textbook. It was supposed to take nine months to master quadratic equations and negative numbers. So I taught myself elementary calculus. The next summer I enrolled in summer school. That way Algebra two could be swept out of the way in a couple of months.
My reading had consisted of comics, science fiction and science texts. I started reading outside of that and my vocabulary quickly exceeded that of my teachers. I would write down every word that I didn't know, look it up and write the definition in a notebook that I kept in my back pocket. A habit I wish I'd retained.
The vocabulary would be a problem. Using words people don't know is an easy way to piss them off. Maybe I was being pretentious. I don't know enough about my 14 year old self to remember. I was beginning to feel a big split between myself and the rest of mankind, misanthropy was kicking in big time. Using words the common folk didn't know could've been a weapon or at least insulation. On the other hand to this day I take great pleasure in the Latinate end of 18th century writing.
One time I got drunk and laughed hysterically about "hypostatizing the eschaton." (More or less time ending and eternity beginning.) I'd never read theology and can't guess where that came from. One of those things that are only funny if you are drunk or stoned.
When I was an architectural blueprint delivery boy for Teledyne in Atlanta I told my boss I wanted to ask him a question. He said it'd be OK if I wouldn't use those 'fancy words'. I didn't think that I was too highfalutin' but took the hint and learned to trim my word usage to PBS/NPR level.
I knew more about science than my science teachers. I was bored, feeling like I was being held in a waiting cell. So I went to the local college and said "Let me in! Let me in!"
Surprisingly enough they were open to the idea. In my adolescent arrogance I wasn't surprised. But I would be. The principal of Shuman Junior High, Mr. T.H.E. Edwards, had to give his OK. He wouldn't. Said I wasn't mature enough. Since we'd never met nor talked I thought this was just a generic judgment. It kept me in the public schools.
I ran into him when I was 20. My father was head electrician for the Board of Education. One of the perks was a free house on the grounds of a school. I was visiting my parents when Mr. Edwards who'd become the principal of the school my parents lived next to came to the door. I wanted to slam the door outward and knock him to the ground. Sanity prevailed but if I could get in a time machine and do it invisibly I probably would. I rarely think of him but it is a grudge I don't mind keeping.
Not being let into college early was a great example of the road not taken. If I'd gotten in I might've never switched my allegiances to other things. I might've made a contribution to cosmology. Or become a laboratory drudge. I wouldn't be who I am now. No regrets. I've liked my life. Wishing the past different would be like wishing I were dead.
Fortuitously I bought Hamlet. In retrospect I may have liked the blonde guy on the cover. Maybe his attire reminded me of the fantasy novels that I was reading back then. The fantasy boom was yet to happen but The Ballantine Adult Fantasy series was in full sway. It was mostly reprints of British and American lit: James Branch Cabell, forgotten novels by George Meredith, William Morris and G.K. Chesterton's never neglected The Man Who Was Thursday. No Piers Anthony.
That probably had an influence I've never thought about before writing this. The joys of good English prose were as obvious as those of an equation or theoretical model of the universe. I'd go on to buy Boswell's Life of Johnson and Johnson's own Lives of the English Poets. The selection was a fluke of availability. If other books had been in the store I'd've bought them. This was the age of the quality paperback. You could go into K-Mart and Walter Kaufman on existentialism would be next to the latest Peanuts collection.
I stopped wondering what the gravity of the surface of a neutron would be. I started reading Keats. It was warm and sensual. Perfect for submerged sexuality.
Edward Rutherford, Neils Bohr and Paul Dirac were replaced in my Top 10 Countdown by Edward Gibbon, Max Beerbohm and Evelyn Waugh. Not at first. The desire to totalize experience by science had me reading philosophy. I read Camus, Karl Jaspers, even had a go at Heidegger. It wasn't for me. Their constructs weren't what I was looking for. Naively I was looking for 'answers,' for 'truth.' A terribly foolish way to read philosophy.
And I'd read too much lit. crit. instead of actual lit. A quick way to kill aesthetic pleasure. I've spent years recovering from that. Still can't pass up an article by Frank Kermode.
Only Nietzsche became a part of me and I've already written about him in the journal.
Funny thing is that I never became that literary. Or ever read that much. Oh I've read more than most people. And read much that ever fairly literate people don't. But it is just a component. I read for my admiration of form, not for anything like wisdom. I'd feel a fraud if I gave you the impression that I'm more learned than I am.
In the 11th grade the head of the college's math department came by with a Get Out of Jail Free card. Having met my math teacher he offered to let me take my first college calculus course while I was still in high school. That was followed by two calculus courses back-to-back while in an abbreviated summer session.
While I do remember the neat symbol for the fourth dimension, I can't define a polynomial or calculate a differential. But the early years of strong interest will shape forever how I reason. I'm governed as much by intuition but most people seem sloppy thinkers at best. And the people who think of them selves as rational usually have the most capriciously chosen axioms.
Anybody who really questions reality probably wouldn't say so on a bumper sticker.
Instead of beginning the 12th grade I entered my first year of college (thank goodness, I never wanted to make up the PE and geography courses that I'd skipped). My last year too. I switched to Lit. and Phil. courses but wasn't enamored of my classmates. They didn't seem a whole heck smarter than the root vegetables in high school. You couldn't do anything else with an English degree than teach English.
I did have a good professor. Joseph Killorin, a graduate of the very elite St. John's. But he liked the St. John's approach: classes as colloquiums. I wanted to listen to him talk. He'd been a friend of Conrad Aiken, eventually editing Aiken's letters. He taught at Armstrong because the very wealthy Calloway family had established a fund to pay him a largish salary.
There's no way to escape democracy politically. But I'm a fascist when it comes to who I spend my time with. A part of me Charles deplores. He likes gatherings of people. I used to get heebie-jeebies just from going to a mall. But a gathering of drunk and stoned strangers laughing at their own snot is like being in prison. Actually I had a better time in jail.
So I quit. Went to work in a warehouse and got high. Bummed around. Hit different parts of the US. (It will always be a pity that I didn't at least stay long enough to learn how to proofread.)
I can hardly remember how any of my teachers looked. Trying really hard I can remember six out of the dozens. And I can only remember the name of Pam Tolshak. She called me a fascist, dimmed it to talking about Plato's philosopher kings and told me that I might like H.L. Mencken. The last helped me become the cheerful guy I am now.
The fat oaf that was my high school counselor I made the mistake of telling to his face that he and everyone else in the school was my inferior. If there'd been a postage stamp for hatred of your fellow man they'd have put my picture on it.
He told my parents that I needed counseling. First I went to a psychologist who only administered tests. The only part I remember was having to draw pictures of a man and a woman. I was heavily influenced by late 70's Jack Kirby so the woman's breasts were at least as large as her head. No clue to my queerness there.
He passed me along to a psychiatrist. Dr. Wolfe was urbane and likeable, I enjoyed chatting with him. He did no harm other than other than waste my lower middleclass parents' money. When I realized that a pretty boy was a joy at least until he turned 25 all he did was ask me if I minded. I said no, he said fine. Don't know if we talked about it aside from that.
I didn't need a shrink. I needed to be away from my father. One time I thought I was offered a chance to spend a couple of weeks in a hospital just relaxing. When I got their I found myself in a psychiatric clinic. They had basket weaving and group therapy. I refused to sign myself in and demanded to be let out.
My elementary school's administrators had told my parents that I needed help. I was since to the freebie child guidance counselors provided by the county. I got my first taste of the I.Q. test. My scores varied widely so I kept having to take the damn thing for years. The kiddy therapists would play games with me while we talked. As far as I can recollect the visits had no effect. I didn't like the taste of the nerve tonic I was on for a time but the box of chocolate cover cherries every Xmas was welcome.
Most of my teachers just seemed uninteresting adults who stood in front of the room. I remember my geometry teacher's approach. She'd obviously formulated her lesson plans long before and never varied them a whit since. More a clockwork than a person. It was a class that I could've enjoyed greatly instead of merely mark time.
My Advanced Math teacher enabled my escape. She was a rare creature. She really loved mathematics. She should've been teaching at a university. I'm glad she wasn't.
One English teacher was actually fairly well-read and one of the few that I felt had a real idea of how I felt. After I came out I went back to visit her to tell her that I was gay. She was happy I'd come to understand myself and pointed me to Oscar Wilde whose biography I got from the library.
My biology teacher spent most of her time making dirty jokes and currying the favor of the athletes. The school slut was her pet. I didn't really anything about the girl. That was her role. I've been trying to remember if she made fun of me or if I just have a fragmentary false memory born of my disgust with her.
I had two typing teachers. The first was senile and should've been retired. As long as you could type a full page in the required time you passed even if it was mostly errors. When the school board caught one she was replaced by a former Miss Georgia. At the end of the year she had us type out our 'Views on Life' She didn't know how to react to my splenetic paragraphs.
My first chemistry teacher quit to run a liquor store. He was replaced by a podiatrist who'd just moved to Savannah. The class taught him some but mostly wasted time. He was replaced by someone I can't remember at all. A professional 'educator' who was tone deaf to the music of molecules and atoms.
Years later I'd realize that one of my science teachers was a lesbian. As were the music and art teachers who lived together. I don't think two single male teachers would've dared do that.
Integration came my first year of Junior High. I had my first and only African American teacher. I remember once when people were being rowdy she told everybody to be quiet because we weren't in church. It wasn't until I started listening to gospel that made sense. Few people who love funk or rockabilly understand how much they owe to people getting happy with the Lord.
My physics teacher had nothing but contempt his students. But he liked me. So he'd have me hide in the store room and make weird noises why his classes took tests. He also got me to give a lecture telling his classes that I was from Venus.
I was so extremely the school oddity that I guess it gave me some sort of cachet. All the jocks would say hi to me. My friend Randall who was a routine nerd simply did not exist.
On the school bus home one day, one of the prettiest girls in the school asked me if she could sit in my lap. I looked up from my book, gave her a baffled "No" and went back to reading. A bit later I realized that this had to have been an attempt to humiliate me. I was just too oblivious to get it and luckily was so cool that I triumphed.
It wasn't until years later through bad movies I got any inkling of what a status jungle the teens years of school evidently are.
I know I was keen on the idea of romance. I wrote some poetry that thankfully ceased to exist decades ago. And I read some most likely dreadful Celtic faery romances. I didn't connect this with sex. I didn't have any conscious awareness of sex. I was masturbating heavily but that all existed in its own pocket universe, never connecting with the rest of life.
And I didn't pine for love. But I'd made up for that pathetically when my sexuality emerged shortly before I was 18. I'm pretty happy I grew up that way. I think I was spared confusion and pain that might have made me neurotic, even ruined me.
My mother would tell me how she cried when she graduated from High School. She hated to leave and wanted to go on to college which was impossible since she had to go and earn a living. (First as a waitress in the honky-tonk hotdog joint where she met my father. For many decades as a bank clerk.) I guess I let her down when I quit and never went back.
Even now when I pass a Middle or High School I shudder a little.