A question you asked me a long time ago

Kindergarten, and I am learning from home. We walk my sister to her first day of junior high, and then at home in our house trailer my mother begins my schooling. All I remember is lunch – the metal Disney lunchbox daughter and I still use for outtings, and packaged foods to make me feel like I’m in a real school.

First grade, and we are in the house by the canal. Long mornings of ABCs and lined paper, and mornings when we stick it to the man and skip school altogether to play. I gash my foot on a broken bottle under a bridge and run bleeding the length of the block to our house. Years later I will amuse my daughter with the scar. My mother gives me bread to feed the swans and I get in trouble for using the bread as a trap so I can throw rocks at them. Swans are bastards.

Second grade, and it’s Florida now and harder to concentrate, the air warm and the backyard crawling with arthropodal and reptilian life. We catch some and we call this science class and it is. Christine lives next door and her parents aren’t Christians. Their house smells like pet shampoo. The end of the year and we fly to Ohio and back to visit a church my dad is candidating at, and I bring back thoughts of Amy, the white-sweatered angel who looked at me all fluttery-like at the welcome cookout. I speak to her again twenty years later at a wedding and still feel shy.

Third grade, and we are in the midwest again. I remember little from this year academically beyond a history lesson I read on the open staircase one morning. There is also my new appreciation for tea, and my Oedipal adoration for Dr. Crusher from The Next Generation, and the flood I still have nightmares about; shooting a plastic missile into my dad’s eye from across the room and getting a stern lecture on safety.

Fourth grade, and it’s long division I can’t understand. My mom buys a toy car and dangles it as a carrot if I finish the problems in a set time, and I try so hard and fail, and neither one of us understands why I can’t just have the car anyway. I am free range before it is a buzz phrase. Nine years old and I walk miles down roads, under bridges and into woods where I disappear for halves of days. I show my wife years later and she hardly believes me. There is a church split so bad we fear physical violence.

Fifth grade, and it’s my first in a real school, the Christian one I’ll be recovering from for decades. Grades are paired 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 7-8, and I begin my cycle of social rejection one year and social royalty the next. I am bullied daily and come home crying. The gym teacher is an asshole and also sometimes preaches at our church on Sunday evenings. I ask Candice if she wants to be my girlfriend one night after AWANA, and she says yes and runs to her car.

Sixth grade, and I discover wit, and the world is not ready. My teacher is 4’10″ and tough as nails, but likes me. She’s good at what she does. I am mean to the uncool kids because it’s the first time I’ve ever been cool. I write my first poetry, cinquains about nature, and one gets put in the church bulletin. I have a girlfriend, Lisa, and then another, the pretty one who has boobs before all the other girls, and then Lisa again. We feel mature because we say we know we don’t understand what love is, but we don’t believe it. I discover Poe, Bierce, Stoker.

Seventh grade, the worst year of my life. I don’t bathe enough and don’t have clothes that fit me and I can’t catch a basketball and the girls only talk to me because Jesus wants them to be nice. My two friends are losers and our lunch hours are a wash of genitalia jokes and hoping the cool kids don’t use us for sport. I get chicken pox for the second time and sprain both wrists trying to slam dunk off a folding chair in the driveway. I get in big trouble for making a condom joke in science class. I’m completely miserable and come the closest I’ll ever come to suicide, knife in hand, but I’m saved by cowardice.

Eighth grade, and I find my voice, and my voice is a pissy little prick with eloquent disregard for authority. I get in a lot of trouble at school, but the cool kids think I’m funny. My best friend and I memorize Gangster’s Paradise and buy Starter jackets and walk around like we’re tough as shit. This is balanced by the fact we both still like Mariah Carey and Christian radio and Nerf toys. I read The Hobbit. My trouble at school gets me in trouble at home. A silent rift develops between my dad and I that won’t begin to heal for more than a decade.

Ninth grade, and my first kiss, and the dozens after that. It’s a sea of horrendous poetry and even worse love letters. I begin a trend of dating girls who have experienced horrific abuse, because I’m the only one who listens well and they’re the only ones who notice. I search for an identity in the inbred social swamp of my Christian high school. I write an Onion-esque fanzine about the star of the eighth grade basketball team and make a couple hundred dollars selling raffle tickets for a basketball signed by the kid I’m lampooning. The administration seems unphased by my profiting from satire during school hours. Some of them even buy tickets.

Tenth grade, the first hint of who I will be. I discover Shakespeare and a hundred others, and music that, if not good, is a step in the right direction. I am best friends with the coolest girl in school, and I tag along on her dates with a jock, a parental requirement on his side because Satan takes your soul along with your virginity, it says it right there in the Bible. They break up and she and I stay friends and read each other poetry and gossip about celebrities. I write the first few poems I won’t immediately hate, and get a tragic short story published in the school paper called Apartment 58b. I fall for a gorgeous girl with a borderline personality and more issues than Windows ME, another abuse victim, and it ends poorly. So do her suicide attempts, because she lacks resolve.

Eleventh grade, and the curtain comes back on the popular kids, and a few of us discover ironic clothing from Goodwill and punk rock music. I have one of the epic crushes of my life, my friend’s college sister, and the crush has legs and sticks around for more than a year. So does she, both counts. I write pining verses she will never read. I write a lot, actually, and not all about her. I discover I can process and reshape things with poetry. None of it is very good, but there are lines here and there, and the spirit is behind it. I’m surprised to find my friends don’t dream of marriage. I wear plaid pants and read Orwell and don’t talk about myself very much.

Twelfth grade, and I am so done with this place. It’s January, a special academic term, and I’m spending four hours a day teaching myself trigonometry alone in a classroom, drinking hot tea at the teacher’s desk and wearing cardigans because screw them. I’m best friends with the coolest girl in school again, a new girl from a real school, and she has a massive crush on the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, and she is downright evangalistic about it. Every Wednesday afternoon I take the car and don’t come home till late after youth group, writing for hours in coffeeshops and digging through thrift store bins and walking with the cool girl through cemeteries. I become a socialist, in theory. Mostly I’m just pissed off and like Rage Against the Machine. I can’t wait to leave town when this school charade is over. I discover Salinger and Over the Rhine.

And then right at the very end of it all, so late in the game you could almost miss it, She.

And that’s the story of how we met.

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Linking with Emily today.