It was another world. Williamsburg, Virginia, out on the green at sunset, trying out a box of Altoids for the first time. Princeton, watching on TV as history collided in Iran and in Beijing. On the way to the first stage of That Month, though I had no idea that’s what it would turn out to be.
The United States Military Academy, at West Point, is way up on the bluff overlooking the Hudson. The dropoff from the back balcony of Eisenhower Hall is precipitous. It’s green and foggy and gray and full of ghosts, and it’s just an amazing place to spend a week – even if you’re just one donkey in the Academic Workshop Battalion, Bravo Company, Second Platoon, squad 2. Whatever – it was enough for me to turn on Navy and pull for the Black and Gold ever since when first Saturday in December comes around. From there, it was on to Orlando, Disney World, received by my teammates like a conquering hero as we swept out to do to the rest of the country what we’d done to Alabama. From there, Alabama Governor’s School, two weeks in one of the leafiest parts of the campus of Jesus A&M, somewhat back to Earth but still definitely not the drudgery of high school.
I know what most people think I mean when I talk about what happened in June 1989. I know what I used to mean, anyway, and I’m not proud of the fact that a lot of people had to compete with a ghost. But twenty years on, I’ve long since realized that the actual flesh-and-blood person who had that name was long gone before even a year had passed, and isn’t a part of the story in the way the ghost was. And in reality, the ghost was only a tiny reflection of the whole of what really happened and what I really obsessed over.
Because the whole was this: I was everywhere, flying between New York and Florida and constantly on the move. I was surrounded by new and amazing things. I had interesting people all around. Some of them were even girls. Who were interested in me. Which was a completely new and unfamiliar experience. And most important of all: these people were all like me. I wasn’t the Black Swan anymore. I wasn’t the weirdo, or the space freak, or the person who sat there in the parking lot of Piggly Wiggly and thought “This can’t possibly be the place I should be.” I belonged, in every way that mattered. I had found my place in the world. Everything I’d ever dreamed of, wished for, cried over – it was all right there, every bit of it. And if the devil had appeared right then, in his oily Rupert Everett pompadour and posh accent and arched eyebrow, and said “for the low, low price, today only, of a mere ONE soul–” I would have bitten the tip off my own finger to sign in blood before he could finish. And then…
There’s an old joke in Silicon Valley. Bill Gates dies, and St Peter is looking at a clipboard and says “Gosh, we don’t know what to do. The Foundation on one hand, but Windows ME on the other…tell you what, we’ll let you pick.” So they look at Heaven – nice, white, cool, airy, a bit dull perhaps. Then they look at Hell – wild, noisy, casino games, dance music, lights flashing, hot chicks gyrating, Vegas on acid – and Bill Gates says “Let’s go with Hell.” Instantly – dark, sulfur, lava, red-hot poker up the anus, and he screams “WTF, this is nothing like the Hell you showed me!!”
“Sorry, Bill,” says St Peter, “that was the demo.”
to be continued…