Edge of Seventeen

My Night on the Evening News and the Cutting Room Floor

I was just 17 and you know what I mean. Or do you? At 17, I was having a consequential junior year at the Booker T. Washington High School for Performing and Visual Arts, which meant that I had escaped what counted for normal life in Dallas. I was neither apple polisher nor hall monitor, but I was not exactly a “What are you rebelling against? What have you got?” sort, either. How could I, when I could devote my life to acting, writing, jazz combo and girls? I was rushing into life, with no long term plan. All things considered, my parents were remarkably indulgent. One night, I was trailed by a traffic cop who gave me four tickets. My father and I went through the scene and he took pictures, giving me Clarence Darrow level defenses for every move. He was on my side! Look, he showed me. There are no lights here. You could not have seen these signs. I drove a brown ‘75 Buick Le Sabre with a passenger door that didn’t work, central casting for a drug mule. I looked like someone who did drugs, but I didn’t. I played a heavy drinker in a production of Time of Your Life, but it was acting. I got a haircut and put on coat and tie for two trials, and both times the cops didn’t show—presidential motorcades for George H.W. Bush. That would have cost over $400! Phew!

I was writing for the school paper, mostly about feeling out of place in the real world outside this little bubble. One night, I was backing my vintage Buick into a driveway, I had a rifle pulled on me, and I wrote about it for my school paper. The world out there was not like this sweet bohemian school. In 1990, I was shocked to be faced with a gun; business as usual in today’s high schools. I didn’t feel innocent. Look at that picture. I felt that opposite of innocent. I was seriously up to no good. You are, after all, reading a Substack called Trouble Man. But looking back, it still seemed Edenic.

Was I up to getting into what the late Civil Rights icon John Lewis called “Good Trouble”? (I was playing changes written by the other John Lewis, of the Modern Jazz Quartet.) I rocked a houndstooth blazer I picked up at a thrift store for three dollars, and found succor with those who got the jokes and got me. I was imitating satirical writers for the school paper, including Tom Wolfe and PJ O’Rourke, the only conservatives to appear in Rolling Stone, my sole subscription. I was not a conservative—I didn’t know any in my circle—but I appreciated irreverence if it was well turned and earned. I read Gulliver’s Travels with my father at 14 before we read it in Junior English class. at 17. I knew enough to know the difference between ridicule and satire, and I aspired to both. I was not a 17 year old who needed to be told what to do with his life. There were too many things I wanted to do. I didn’t like some of my classes, but I loved life, and I approached it as an exhibitionist. Rose Parker, who was my newspaper guru, had to set me straight when I was considering psychology as a career, as fun as it was as an AP class, which included a musical I wrote about Anna and Sigmund Freud with Kira Zimmerman, my Rabbi’s daughter. We were Goffin and King on that one, and the dolls were hers. She did pursue a career in psychology. As for me, Rose Parker told me, “What you should do is get paid for writing and talking about things you think are important.” Dear Reader, take the young man at 17, and I’ll show you the man for life.

In the midst of that, the local news brought their reporter into my school one day. The subject was earrings. (TV, they have a way of lowering the bar, don’t they?) Apparently, some high school students wore them in a way to communicate with other gangs. Education is not one size fits all, and the earrings at my school were for fashion. I never pierced my ear, but I did think this was ridiculous. I took umbrage! Did these people know umbrage? The word, I mean? I loved my school, but I got very lucky with my English and History teachers. I was not a good math or science student, but I did not deserve the abysmal instruction I got in those subjects. I learned, even at 14, that one had to be a smart shopper. I was relentless with my guidance couneslor until I got the English teachers I wanted. If I had been passive, my whole life could have been different. The teachers I fought for—Mr. Davison, Dr. Northouse—were extraordinary. The others were everyone else’s education. When I was stuck in a class where we were to be indoctrinated into Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged—not as literature, but as agitprop—I met a pretty girl who agreed to go on a date with me to a production of Beckett’s Happy Days, which took some doing since I was 15 and had to map the whole thing out on bus routes. When I defected to Mr. Davison, she hated me forever, even when we wound up at the same college. Needless to say, we never had that date. Like Beckett characters, we did not move.

Anyway, the cameras were going around, and a friend of a friend, who had an earring, now a lawyer, said something like, “This is outrageous! This is America!” When the newscaster made his way, I improvised an entire speech. I wish I could remember what it was. The sound bite, very brief, was something about how if the people in charge of education moved on from this frivolous matter to the three r’s, “we’d all be better off.” But what got cut out was that we had a few legendary teachers who had been at the school since its founding, but many of the teachers the district threw at us didn’t care about what the school was about. They were ignorant, barely literate people, and it showed the dangers of falling through the system, because there is a particular agony in having a stupid person having power over you. It is a misery that many have to endure. It has the potential to create a world of Bartelbys. I gave some kind of spirited speech about how even though I loved and respected the best teachers I got to have, I knew I was lucky, and I knew I was this close into pushing back against the Ayn Rand cultist impersonating a literature teacher. There was excellence in the school, but one had to know where to get it. The counselor that was in charge of M-Z was so incompetent, many of crossed over to the A-L counselor to talk to a lucid human being. So I knew what I loved and I knew what I did not love, and I knew what would steer me to whatever success meant, if success means making a living with one’s passions, however implausible. There is a conversation that we could have had about what makes an excellent teacher. I got to have real conversations about real works of literature and develop my voice as a critic. In Mrs. Parker’s history class, in 9th grade, she had us read a PJ O’Rourke article from Rolling Stone called “Poles Just Wanna Have Fun.” My paper was called “The Ultimate Polish Joke?” She gave me a grade of 120 and told me not to get a swelled head.

When I talked to the news I had a bit of a swelled head. I was a teenager standing up to clueless baseline model of what education was really about. I had just read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man for the first time! The great man was still alive. I thought he could have been working on another masterpiece! I didn’t know that he had a listed number, and when young people called Ellison, R. on Riverside Drive in the Manhattan phone book, he sometimes picked up. He was not busy finishing another masterpiece. I had a terrible work ethic then—I would have understood! I identified with his book so much, even though I was at the beginning and he was nearing his end, even though he was writing about the 30s and I was starting the 90s. That’s what makes something timeless. I was aware of how public speaking could lift you up, and I didn’t think through the reasons Ellison’s hero hid in a basement in the end. (He did say he was planning to come out. And do what? I wondered.) For the cameras, I was running for office, but was I really? I was the student who was standing up for studying things that mattered, things that the people in power might have been afraid of. I didn’t want to be a politician. I wanted to be an artist. But I had a message for them. Talking about earrings is stupid, because it does not apply to this school. It is a distraction. We need to be independent thinkers. We want to contribute to the world we will inherit. We need to overcome the bad teachers and make the most of the great ones.