I go to Towson, High
After catching Superbad last week, I've had the Paul Feig/Judd Apatow/Seth Rogen crew on the brain. This creative team breaks my heart regularly with their tantalizing offers of romance for losers and nerds, and I have carefully avoided The 40-Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, despite overwhelming evidence that they are fantastic, funny films. Still, I cannot resist their offers to revisit those agonizing teen years as one of the blessed suburban middle class, with all the freedom from danger and want and all the burden of high expectations they entailed.
It was sometime during my second year at Dumbarton Middle School, the horrors of puberty foiling every attempt at social or academic achievement, that I finally flunked out of the "Gifted & Talented" program and gave up. From Geek to Freak in 6 bloody periods. One day it was Damian Hammontree, boy genius, asking me to go steady over his visual demonstration of the fractal properties of music, and the next day it was Tim Tarpley, dull-witted jock, trying to shove his tongue in my mouth over a bottle of Four Roses under the railroad bridge. My first kiss. To his credit, Tarpley - he had a nickname like "ferret" or "weasel" - didn't press the issue after I bit him and took off, "Gotta go!," He may have been preoccupied with the possibility of needing stitches.
The above incident reveals that, despite huge efforts - utterly unlike the ones I put into academics - I was never much of a success as a Freak. The great thing about Freaks, though, was that they had exceedingly low standards and would even let weird, smart girls hang out with them. The legend of Ferret spread quickly and assured me a degree of safety from predation that none of my Freak girlfriends - I am deeply saddened to say - enjoyed.
Instead, I was free to pursue a gifted & talented program in subjects like Drug Use, Vandalism, Authority Evasion and Party Crashing. While Damian Hammontree was acing the SATs in 8th grade and accepting early admission to Johns Hopkins at 15, I was scrounging change out of my parents sofa to buy Marlboro Reds and learning how to "own" a room long enough to make off with all the booze. My Anti-role models were kids like Eddie L. and Stephanie G. who mugged a man for heroin money ... while I scrambled to escape from Eddie's car; Eddie D. who, baseball bat in hand, walked me home drunk one night ... and another night raped my friend Anne at a squat for runaways; Karl H. who turned me on to Pink Floyd and Hot Tuna before committing suicide ... and was one of the few I thought had a chance.
The fact that I am alive and posting this to a blog shows that I was merely a "D" student. For all my fervent studies, I flunked at being a loser. Most of the Freaks thought I put on airs - the taint of a Geek vocabulary is difficult to conceal - and never trusted me enough to let me in on their worst (Eddie L. & Stephanie were the exception, being too far gone to care.) Also, despite my dismal academic and social record, I earnestly enjoyed a lot of Geek pastimes: Horseback riding, Theatre tech, Morning announcement crew ("Good morrrrrrrning, Towson!") You can imagine how the Freaks looked upon all this unaffected Geek-ery: With unaffected mock-ery. By rejecting the little good I clung to, though, the Freaks ultimately saved me from their own fate.
The summer I turned sixteen, I dropped out of high school. Thereby officially surviving the experience - even if only by getting out while the getting was good. For the record, it was the smartest thing I ever did as a teenager. No more Freaks and Geeks. Just Do or Die.
There was a Graduate program ... but that is a story for another post.
It was sometime during my second year at Dumbarton Middle School, the horrors of puberty foiling every attempt at social or academic achievement, that I finally flunked out of the "Gifted & Talented" program and gave up. From Geek to Freak in 6 bloody periods. One day it was Damian Hammontree, boy genius, asking me to go steady over his visual demonstration of the fractal properties of music, and the next day it was Tim Tarpley, dull-witted jock, trying to shove his tongue in my mouth over a bottle of Four Roses under the railroad bridge. My first kiss. To his credit, Tarpley - he had a nickname like "ferret" or "weasel" - didn't press the issue after I bit him and took off, "Gotta go!," He may have been preoccupied with the possibility of needing stitches.
The above incident reveals that, despite huge efforts - utterly unlike the ones I put into academics - I was never much of a success as a Freak. The great thing about Freaks, though, was that they had exceedingly low standards and would even let weird, smart girls hang out with them. The legend of Ferret spread quickly and assured me a degree of safety from predation that none of my Freak girlfriends - I am deeply saddened to say - enjoyed.
Instead, I was free to pursue a gifted & talented program in subjects like Drug Use, Vandalism, Authority Evasion and Party Crashing. While Damian Hammontree was acing the SATs in 8th grade and accepting early admission to Johns Hopkins at 15, I was scrounging change out of my parents sofa to buy Marlboro Reds and learning how to "own" a room long enough to make off with all the booze. My Anti-role models were kids like Eddie L. and Stephanie G. who mugged a man for heroin money ... while I scrambled to escape from Eddie's car; Eddie D. who, baseball bat in hand, walked me home drunk one night ... and another night raped my friend Anne at a squat for runaways; Karl H. who turned me on to Pink Floyd and Hot Tuna before committing suicide ... and was one of the few I thought had a chance.
The fact that I am alive and posting this to a blog shows that I was merely a "D" student. For all my fervent studies, I flunked at being a loser. Most of the Freaks thought I put on airs - the taint of a Geek vocabulary is difficult to conceal - and never trusted me enough to let me in on their worst (Eddie L. & Stephanie were the exception, being too far gone to care.) Also, despite my dismal academic and social record, I earnestly enjoyed a lot of Geek pastimes: Horseback riding, Theatre tech, Morning announcement crew ("Good morrrrrrrning, Towson!") You can imagine how the Freaks looked upon all this unaffected Geek-ery: With unaffected mock-ery. By rejecting the little good I clung to, though, the Freaks ultimately saved me from their own fate.
The summer I turned sixteen, I dropped out of high school. Thereby officially surviving the experience - even if only by getting out while the getting was good. For the record, it was the smartest thing I ever did as a teenager. No more Freaks and Geeks. Just Do or Die.
There was a Graduate program ... but that is a story for another post.
posted by EggOfTheDead at 3:46 PM
2 Comments:
Yow, Eggers, this may be the nicest thing anyone's ever blogged about me. I didn't know that you'd dropped out, though, but that was after the JH/HS shuffle. Still, sounds like you had a life more interesting than .. ok, every single person I went to college with (chick from calc 3 class getting me drunk on sake notwithstanding). -DH
My goodness. This is the tenth time I have read this sordid but deliciously enticing tale. It's almost like you post it over and over and over again.
Finally, I caught on to the fact that you haven't posted since September. Where the heck are you, Eggy? I miss ya!
edgykins,
lower-case boog
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