I found out on the evening of February 28, 1994 that I had been accepted at Vanderbilt for grad school – complete with a prestigious fellowship with more money associated than any other offer I’d had. The next day I ditched all classes, got in my car and drove to Nashville to ram-raid the bookstore and have lunch at Old Spaghetti Factory. And at that point, I was basically done with undergrad in my mind except to play out the string.
For thirty years, I’ve said that attending BSC was the biggest mistake of my life. I stand by that. But only slightly less a mistake was the misapprehension that somehow, graduate school would launder my undergrad experience – that it could actually be what I’d been told college would be from the time I was five years old, the place where I could pursue my interests and feel belonging and be self-actualized as a person. Grad school can be many things, but a do-over on college is absolutely not one of them, as I learned to my cost.
But that was in the future. To me, it felt like a second chance, like vindication, like being received at last. If I’d had the sense God gave a golf ball, I would have taken the opportunity for a completely fresh start and a total do-over, but I didn’t. I was going away for school to a new city with different interstates and different TV and radio stations, but I was staying together with a girlfriend who was already showing signs of serious mental instability. Which might be why I stayed with her, because heaven knows BSC was not great for my mental health, and I thought I owed her that much. So it goes.
But all those regrets and recriminations were also in the future. What I had instead was a quiet spring, full of humid orange sunsets through fresh green leaves and leisurely drives in my barely-year-old Saturn. Classes were more an afterthought than ever. Vampire’s hours were in effect. A handful of people would go to the grocery store at midnight for ice cream. Once, we drove up to Jasper to the 24-hour Walmart just because it was there and we needed something to do. And as graduation approached, I was increasingly gripped with regret – that I’d never actually pursued starting that college bowl team, that I’d spent three years with my first girlfriend instead of trying to build a life of my own, that there hadn’t been any evenings out on the dorm quad patio hanging out with friends. And as I was walking back to my room alone on that last night before graduation, I blurted out to the night “there’s so much I still haven’t done.”
That, honestly, is when it began. That was the seed for three decades of angst and despair and wishing for a better past and endless hours and days and years of trying to find a way to make the pebbles have been worth counting. And yet, the next day, when I walked into Boutwell Auditorium to the soaring organ strains of “Pomp & Circumstance” and saw the blue and pink lights behind the college seal on stage, it was with a tremendous sense of mission accomplished. The job was done. Now I could do what I want with my life. And maybe if I’d cut all the ties then and moved on completely, that feeling would have stayed…but that took another three years, by which point I was done forever with Birmingham. Or so I thought.
It was in 2006 when I finally cut ties for good, after the David Pollick fiasco which I correctly predicted would come to no good end. A growing sports program, one in Division I which had won a Big South men’s basketball title and sent a baseball team to the NCAAs to beat an SEC team, was axed in favor of Division III because it was “unaffordable” – then they added the most expensive and problematic sport a school can play and built an on-campus stadium for it and then dug a lake for no apparent reason and built an all new fraternity row. They couldn’t have given me a bigger middle finger if they’d come to my house and shat in the driver’s seat of that old Saturn. And thus did BSC finally disappear down the black hole, the same as everything in my life before 1998 (and soon, it seemed, everything before 2007).
I started to get things back. I exhumed Vanderbilt and turned it into most of my personality for the better part of a decade and a half, mostly as a way of coping with being squeezed between Stanford and Berkeley. I recovered my high school, thanks to Facebook, at least until Facebook turned to shit. But there was never any attempt to go fishing for the remains of my time on the Hilltop, because there wasn’t anything to fish for. No friends. No connection. Nothing from those four years I wanted to relive or remember that hadn’t been done more effectively in the 21st century in Arlington or California. And honestly, it was not difficult to draw a line from 1990 to 1997 that would deposit me on the steps of National Geographic after seven years of a life lived on offense rather than defense, where I’d actually had the experience I had been told since kindergarten would allow me to be myself and thrive and be validated as a human being.
But in kicking BSC down the well, I set myself up. Once I had only Vanderbilt as a touchstone, a reset, I was forcing myself to start from a higher bar. It was as if I’d hit a double, stolen third, then decided I was born on third base and kicked myself for never making it home. Thirty years on, sat in the courtyard of U Fleku where I’d been in 1992 and enjoying the dark beer instead of staring at it in dread and intimidation, I realized just how far I’d come. That kid who still had so much left to do had no idea how much, and how far. Four continents, a half dozen more countries, National Geographic, Apple, marriage, California, home ownership, electric vehicle ownership, the Internet in my pocket. From this end of three decades, it’s a lot easier to feel like it all came good eventually, even if it took longer and went rockier than it could have.
I’m not going to say “it was all worth it,” because it really wasn’t. Just because you can walk on the leg you broke once doesn’t mean it was never broken. There were lessons I would have been just as happy not to learn, especially since I didn’t seem to learn them until I was flat on my face. But I made the best of it. I learned I could write a little bit – the basketball team never included the campus paper in their annual media scrapbook before I became sports editor. I learned my way around computing a little, enough to know I would really rather have a Mac, and we know how that turned out. I clung to Chapel at Six, which thirty years later would be the first step toward realizing I was actually Episcopalian. And I learned to value those times when you do get to hang out with other people and have a good time, and conversely, to value those times you have to yourself with no obligations. And if you plug BSC back into the gap between RLC and Vanderbilt, suddenly the trajectory looks a lot more impressive, and I have a complete 22 years in and around Birmingham – a place I will claim now in a way I didn’t have time to wait for then.
And the rumblings are that Alabama A&M – the historically Black land grant college that so many of my brother’s teammates attended – is offering $52 million to buy the campus, retain much of the faculty and staff, and open a Birmingham campus. A public HBCU in a residential college setting in a city defined by its Black history. And if that’s the fate of my undergraduate alma mater, I will be thrilled, because that would mean it was reincarnated as a place that genuinely fits its city, fills the needs of its people, and engenders pride in one of its forsaken sons.
Maybe it conquered me once, but at the end, I prevailed. Maybe that’s what I did eventually win in the end.