My senior year of high school was, bluntly put, a hot fucking mess. After a triumphant junior year that ended with a state championship, an MVP at the Auburn Invitational, four aces in my hat, and a monthlong dash through New York and Orlando that included three weeks of actually being attractive to girls, the summer was spent working at an actual law firm for actual cash (what a step up from the produce cooler!) and helling around town with my teammates and my new girlfriend – or rather, my old friend newly turned girlfriend. Made it, Ma – top of the world.
And then the wheels started to come off. The second night of senior year, we went to see 10,000 Maniacs, I took her home – and we forgot to call each other for, like, ever. Meanwhile, my guys all went off to college and I was left with a senior class that I didn’t really have the best relationship with. Add senioritis like a mug, as I had one foot out the door the minute I went back to school, and quite possibly an actual depressive episode (so tough to distinguish from, you know, just being a gifted adolescent in Alabama) – and you can see how things might go off the rails a little.
To the point that by October, I found myself actually dating a pageant girl – the head-cheerleader and top of the class at her rural-exurban high school in the next county over. Not one of my prouder moments. I don’t know why I ran to the exact opposite of what I was notionally after in female companionship. From a safe distance, I might attribute it to showing out at my peers, or a reaction against everything that had happened during the summer and come to naught. More likely, though, I was just in search of whoever was going to validate me. It lasted through January, about like you’d expect – actually you could have won bets taking the over – but at least I had the sense to get clear before February 1 and miss the Valentine’s Window. (It also left me going to prom with no date, which worked out just swell, really. They could have at least offered us refreshments.)
This was also the height of the great college application misadventure, where I only applied to three schools. (The two that sent me applications already filled out and only requiring my signature don’t count.) I took all my official visits, and I absolutely shoved all in on Vanderbilt. The local school was still sending me mail twice a week and inviting me to all sorts of events and whatnot, and Alabama did ship me three sets of tickets for non-conference games (and I used them all, don’t think I didn’t) but in my mind I was locked in on the big V and already making plans for my life there….
If I had it to do over again, I would take what Vandy offered – 75% tuition plus $2000 a year – and do whatever I had to in order to make up the difference. Loans, bank robbery, whatever. But I didn’t, because the local school had offered me two separate full-tuition scholarships (including one of their bigger-name prestige ones) and hey, they’d rushed the hell out of me for the better part of two years, and I’d been associated with them from age 4, and, well, there you have it. They wanted me – or claimed to – and once again, I needed validation. And once again my attention turned, and I started imagining and planning out how things were going to be. And when it turned out the campus was 85% Greek, I signed up for summer rush and just folded that into the plan. And then…well, we all know how that turned out.
If I’m honest, half the reason that undergrad turned into such a misery is because it had to live up to my dream of what college was supposed to be. Maybe nothing could have lived up to the dream, maybe nothing would have prepared me for how bad it was going to be, but either way, it was a bad combination and I was sunk. But that was spring of 1990: haze, allergy, and the impatient desire to just get on with my life. The music all sounds like end-of-the-movie tunes in my memory, and the Nike Air Trainer SC II shoes – in white, dark blue and gray – are still in the back of my head as the Platonic ideal of my new futuristic Nikes; if they ever bring those out in retro form, I’m probably going for it. Man, I haven’t bought a pair of Nikes since…probably since leaving Vanderbilt. That was only a 7 year run, which is amazing compared to my 12 or 13 years in Dr Martens…
So yeah. That was the one time in my life where I was outright eager to let it all go and just move on, and it burned me enough that fourteen years later, I refused to so much as think about what life might be like in California until I was already living there. The moral of the story, I suppose, is be careful you don’t dream yourself into something you can’t wake up to. But at the same time, make sure you don’t change directions and start dreaming of a better past. That way lies madness.
Of which more later.