The Longest Trip Home: A Memoir Read online

  In the course of one semester, I went from As and Bs at Brother Rice to mostly Ds. Algebra II was particularly vexing for

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  me. Unlike at the Catholic school, there was no Math for Dummies track; the whiz kids and the struggling students were all clumped together. It didn’t take me long to become hopelessly lost.

  The teacher was an attractive woman a few years out of college with bright eyes and long blond hair. She was funny and sweet, and I wanted to impress her. At first I raised my hand when she asked if there were questions, but after the third or fourth explanation that only bewildered me more, I stopped raising my hand.

  There were only so many times I could say, “I still don’t get it.”

  She gave up on me, and I gave up on algebra. I simply started taking my best wild guesses, with disastrous results.

  When Mom and Dad saw my report card, I thought they

  would blow double gaskets. I braced myself for the “We should never have let you transfer to public school” speech, but they surprised me. I can only guess they somehow understood what a rocky transition I was having. They said what they always said when I underperformed: “All we ask is that you try your hardest.

  Your best is good enough for us.” I nodded along, but I knew in my heart I wasn’t even doing that.

  The biggest difference between parochial and public education, I learned that year, had nothing to do with uniforms or prayers at the start and close of each school day. The biggest difference was that teachers in Catholic schools did not allow you to fail. If they had to ride you every day of the school year, they would. If they had to beat the knowledge into you, they would. At West Bloomfield, the teachers offered learning the way waiters offer canapés at a cocktail party. You could help yourself or wave them away. If I wanted to learn, they would teach me; if I chose not to, they were happy to ignore me. After nine years of Catholic education, where the nuns and brothers forced performance, often by threat of physical pain, I was free to fail.

  Complicating my academic prospects was the way I chose to commute to school each morning. Rock faithfully took the bus or caught a ride with his father on the way to work, but Tommy de-

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  clared school buses the ultimate in uncool and began hitchhiking the four-mile route. Soon Sack and I were joining him. In rain, in sleet, through two feet of snow, and most of the year in the dark before dawn, we would trudge the half mile to the corner across from the party store and stick out our thumbs. Often on the way Tommy would light a joint to pass. Depending on the difficulty we had getting a ride—not just anyone would stop for three teenage boys—I would arrive at school not only late but stoned as well.

  My first class was French—another course in which I was tank-ing—and one morning the teacher asked me to stand and tell the class something about myself. All I could think to say was “Je m’appelle Jean. Je suis très fatigué.” Very tired and very fried.

  There was only one class in which I excelled, and that was American literature. The teacher, Christine Shotwell, was just out of college and, unlike my algebra teacher, not the stuff of teenage crushes. She sported sensible eyeglasses and a no-fuss haircut. For some reason, she took an interest in me, and I read everything she threw at me: The Crucible, The Scarlet Letter, Of Mice and Men, The Old Man and the Sea. I fell in love with Steinbeck and Hemingway and the worlds they portrayed, so far removed from my own. Then I discovered J. D. Salinger and The Catcher in the Rye. In Holden Caulfield I found a teenager every bit as bewildered and awkward as I was. On every page I recognized a little piece of myself. In Holden, I found a soul mate.

  One day after class, Mrs. Shotwell stopped me on my way out the door. “I was wondering,” she said, “have you ever thought about keeping a journal?” I dabbled in little satires and attempts at humor, but a diary of my own thoughts and feelings had never occurred to me. “I think you ought to try it,” she said. “Who knows what might spill out?” I took her advice, and soon I was hooked. I kept the journal for myself but also for her, an adult who for the first time seemed to care what was locked inside me. The more I shared with her, the more her feedback—wise and heartfelt and never patronizing or judgmental—fueled my desire to write.

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  Shortly after school let out for the summer, Tommy called with exciting news. Saint Mary’s was hosting a large casino-night fund-raiser for its most generous benefactors. It would be a men’s night of eating, drinking, gambling, and smoking cigars, and the college was recruiting neighborhood kids for a variety of jobs, working for tips.

  “It’s gonna be easy money,” Tommy promised.

  “Count me in,” I said. As luck would have it, Tommy and I, and several of our friends, were assigned to the bar service. Not only were the drinkers rumored to be the best tippers of all, but our jobs allowed us to easily swipe a few extra beers for ourselves.

  At the end of the night, our pockets stuffed with tips and our stomachs with leftover food, we retrieved our purloined beers from the ditch where we had stashed them, and made our way across Commerce Road and through the dark neighborhood to the smoking tree, which over the years had become more of a toking-and-drinking tree.

  “Beautiful!” Tommy exclaimed, cracking open a lukewarm brew. “Is this fucking beautiful or what?”

  “It’s fucking beautiful,” I agreed, and we all toasted with a clink of bottles. “Indubitably so.”

  And beautiful it was. I was back with my friends, back in the fold, accepted once again. Sitting shoulder to shoulder on the beach, feet in the water, we laughed and ribbed and prodded each other just like old times. Only one thing was different. Tommy lit a joint to share, and when it came to me I passed it along without lifting it to my lips and without feeling the need to. I had survived tenth grade without self-destructing and picked up some valuable pointers along the way. One of them was that if you had to impress your friends to keep them, they weren’t really friends in the first place. I was figuring out that life was too short and brilliant to spend it suspended in a marijuana cloud. However my life

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  was meant to turn out, it was mine alone to seize or squander. No one else was going to do it for me.

  Tommy let out a whoop, and so did I. We had made it to another endless summer. I took a swig of beer and let my body sink into the cool damp sand. Indubitably beautiful, indeed.

  Chapter 15

  o

  Not long into junior year, I found my niche at West

  Bloomfield—in the grungy, cramped office of the stu-

  dent newspaper.

  The Spectrum drew a motley assemblage of students, most of whom did not fit in anywhere else. Tommy was solidly off on the tech-ed track by now, but Sack, Rock, and I, sensing an easy elective, signed on as staff writers. The paper was appallingly bad, even by high-school standards; so bad, in fact, that nearly everyone around school, students and teachers alike, referred to it as the Rectum. The paper offered the obligatory news on sports and extracurricular activities, uncritical reviews of school musicals, and predictable editorials (cafeteria food bad; student rights good). But mostly it contained rambling diatribes about whatever topic tickled an individual staffer’s fancy: women’s rights, Elton John’s latest tour, the environment, acupuncture. After buying a pair of Earth Shoes, the negative-heel Danish footwear that was all the rage then, Sack was inspired to write a two-page celebration of their many virtues. Rock gushed at length about Bob Dy-

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  lan’s newly released Blood on the Tracks. For reasons I’m still not sure of, I weighed in on Transcendental Meditation, which I had never tried and knew almost nothing about.

  Our student adviser, an easygoing teacher named Ms. Pappas, provided abundant freedom but little structure or guidance and almost no quality standards. She let us get awa
y with sloppy, lazy work, and our copy went into print riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. Where was the exacting Brother McKenna when we needed him? I did my part to help the Rectum maintain its reputation for mediocrity, cranking out whatever drivel required the least amount of time and energy.

  There were a few students attempting serious journalism, and one of them penned a piece titled “Fact and Fiction about Gay Life.” It was a thoughtful, intelligent essay that was well re-searched. Ms. Pappas cleared it for publication and sent the issue off to the printer. But when the Spectrum came off the presses and we opened it to page 24, a prominent chunk of the text was missing, replaced by an empty white rectangle. There was only one possible culprit: Mr. Cavin. Our principal insisted on reviewing every galley before releasing it to the printer.

  He had held up publication in the past to demand we remove or rewrite stories he found too controversial or provocative, but this was the first time he had censored an article without informing our adviser in advance. He had simply papered over the section he did not like. It was an act that would galvanize us as young journalists. My fellow Spectrum staffers and I were outraged. Where were our constitutional rights? Where was our freedom of expression? Did the First Amendment not apply to us?

  The Spectrum received no money from the school district, surviving entirely on its own meager revenues from advertisements and the 25-cent cover price. Didn’t that make us quasi-independent?

  Ms. Pappas tried to calm us, but we could tell she was upset, too, and felt just as violated.

  I reacted by marching to the public library and checking out

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  a book I had browsed through before—a book on the radical underground press. It was a topic that had fascinated me for several years, ever since visiting Marijo at the University of Michigan at the height of the antiwar movement. In my bedroom, I read through the case studies of various underground newspapers, many of which sprang to life during the counterculture movement of the late 1960s. They were to mainstream papers what espresso was to instant coffee; I found them impossibly romantic and edgy. I was especially smitten by the Fifth Estate, an underground paper started in Detroit several years earlier by a seventeen-year-old in his parents’ basement. It had grown into one of the country’s most prominent and longest-running alternative voices, providing a platform for the likes of Michigan’s homegrown radical John Sinclair, head of the White Panther Party. If that kid could do it, why couldn’t I?

  I began to dream in earnest. What if I launched my very own underground paper at West Bloomfield High? What if we wrote whatever we wanted in it, and distributed it without anyone’s permission? What if we used words as weapons to challenge the school administration? My mind raced, and I pulled out a note-book and began capturing ideas. For several days, I could barely sleep. By the end of the week I had a mission statement, several possible names, and a list of potential story topics. I laid out my plan to Rock and Sack, and they immediately signed on as my coeditors. Together, we recruited a small army of students eager to participate. Others sought us out and asked to join. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to stick it to The Man.

  Most of the volunteers were boys, but among them were three girls in my grade whom I had seen around school but did not know well. They had impressed me the previous year, however, by smiling sympathetically at me in the hallway at a time when it seemed every other student had ostracized me. In the stratified world of West Bloomfield cliques, Lori, Sue, and Anna were solidly in the one known as the Hippie Chicks. They eschewed makeup

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  and favored muslin peasant smocks and beads. Sue was tiny with a freckled face surrounded by a crown of ringlets that reminded me of Little Orphan Annie. Lori was tall and lanky with long sand-colored hair into which she was always braiding whatever she had at hand: flowers, beads, yarn, ribbon. Anna was the most exotic of the three with a deep mocha complexion and a jungle of dark, frizzy hair even wilder than mine. In the summer, when her skin was especially dark, strangers occasionally mistook her for black. The three of them were constantly together, so much so that it had become a joke around school. People called out to them as if to a single entity: Lorisueanna. I sensed I was just enough of an outcast at school to make me vaguely interesting to them. I found them interesting, too, if a little earnest, and though I wouldn’t dare admit it even to my best friends, cute. Girls were alien goddesses I admired from afar but could seldom summon the courage to approach. Now I would be working side by side with these three, a prospect I found exhilarating.

  We named our nascent publication Innervisions, inspired by (some would charge ripped off from) the Stevie Wonder album of the same name that had come out the previous summer. Beneath it we added the tagline “West Bloomfield’s Independent Student Press.” The newly assembled staff began gathering after school to write, edit, and lay out pages. Our only publishing tools were a pair of electric typewriters, which meant that the only way to typeset our copy was to hand-type our stories into narrow columns, starting over every time we made a mistake. It was tedious, infuriating work, but we stuck with it, day after day. When the copy was finally all in columns, we cut them out with scissors and pasted them onto page dummies, where we added rub-on head-lines, photographs, and simple line drawings. Sack’s piece, titled

  “What the Hell’s Profanity?” made a spirited defense of foul language by using as much of it as he could work in. Rock delivered a screed about the school’s ban on students leaving the campus for lunch. I busted on my drafting teacher for giving students extra

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  credit for buying tickets to the basketball games he coached. I also penned the front-page essay explaining the mission of Innervisions. “This paper does not kiss ass to the parents and other adults of the community by printing only what they want to hear in order to feel more secure,” I wrote in grand fashion.

  Yet for all my bluster, I toiled for hours on this labor of love without daring to breathe a word about it to my own parents.

  Innervisions was filled with foul language, drug humor, and disrespectful portrayals of authority figures. One cartoon showed the vice principal with a tag on his ankle labeling him “Grade A Bullshit.” Another was a drug-addled spoof of the Peanuts comic strip showing “Loosie” and a goateed Charlie Brown smoking catnip in Snoopy’s doghouse. Before Dad found and ripped out my marijuana plant growing among the tomatoes, I proudly photographed it, and that picture made its way onto page 3 to illustrate an irreverent—some would say sacrilegious—biblical parody titled “The Parable of the Lids and the Busches.” In it, a rock star named Messiah, surrounded by his twelve faithful roadies, multiplied two bags of pot and four beers into enough mind-altering substances to inebriate a stadium filled with five thousand concertgoers. I knew Mom and Dad would definitely not see the humor in any of it.

  I was pouring my soul into something I believed in, something I was proud of, something that for the first time in my life gave me the thrill of accomplishment. Yet I could not bring myself to share it with them. I knew they would disapprove. I could see the hurt on their faces and hear the dismay in their voices. In truth, much of the content that I knew would offend them also bothered me. Nearly all the drug humor came from a single student, a senior by the name of Justin Jorgenson, who had signed on as the fourth coeditor and who funneled his considerable creative talent into juvenile humor. He and I argued bitterly over creative control. I pushed for hard-hitting social commentary; he for off-color parody with shock value. I wanted the Fifth Estate meets the Vil-

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  lage Voice; Justin wanted Mad magazine meets High Times. In the end, I kept the worst of it out, but only the worst.

  On the morning of April 7, 1974, my cohorts and I arrived on campus with 900 copies of the eight-page debut issue of Innervisions, printed on mint-green paper, under our arms. We fanned out through the
hallways, bathrooms, and courtyard, quietly peddling them for a dime each. Curiosity ran high, and sales were brisk. Teachers were our best customers of all, often buying multiple copies. Several of them slipped us five- and ten-dollar bills to help defray our printing costs. The whole school was buzzing about “the new underground paper,” and by third hour, we had sold 750 copies, covering our seventy-five-dollar printing tab in full. With the donations from teachers, we were already in the black with 150 copies still to sell. Life as an underground newspaper editor seemed every bit as romantic as I had imagined it would be.

  The next period, all four editors—we had brashly listed our names on the masthead—were summoned out of class to Principal Cavin’s office. He invited us to have seats and opened on a congenial note, telling us how surprised he was to see our “little news-letter” and complimenting us on our initiative. “Quite frankly,”

  he observed, “I didn’t think you four had it in you.”

  As principal, he said, he always liked to encourage students to pursue their passions, even if ours were misguided and imma-ture. “I hardly know where to begin,” he said and slid a copy of the paper in front of us. He went right to the catnip cartoon, then flipped the page and tapped his finger ominously on the photo of my marijuana plant. “Pro-drug messages,” he said with a heavy voice. “And this,” he said, slapping his palm down on the Messiah parable. “You find this amusing? Not only does it glorify drug abuse, it offends religious belief.” He went through the issue page by page, pointing out the many transgressions that made Innervisions totally inappropriate for distribution on campus.

  “And this,” he said, pointing to the cartoon of the vice princi-

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  pal labeled as “Grade A Bullshit.” “This defames Mr. Coe’s character.”

  “That’s impossible,” Justin, the lippiest among us, shot back.

  “Mr. Coe has no character to defame.”