SC Governor's School, class of 1990

It was a summer unlike anything I’d ever known. I was, as the song goes, sixteen going on seventeen, learning to live life on my own. On my own in a state-sponsored summer camp for geeks and overachievers, but on my own after a fashion nonetheless. I was selected to attend the South Carolina Governor’s School for Academics, in Charleston, SC, 1990 edition. Like so many things in life, it came as a result of a missed deadline. Thinking myself something of a poet, I had intended to apply/audition for the Governor’s School of the Arts, held each summer in Greenville. But I screwed around and missed the deadline. This would later be a theme in life, as my college choice was predicated upon acceptance and scholarship eligibility of late applicants, but anyway.

I was selected to attend a six-week intensive college preparatory learning experience on the campus of the College of Charleston. Fifteen year later I still have no idea what that means. But my mom dropped me off in front of the St. Phillips Street Dormitory in downtown Charleston for my first extended stay away from home, my first time living with a roommate, my first time avoiding getting busted for missing curfew, my first blowjob, my first time being one of the cool kids and my first time getting laid. Mom did not expect it to be a summer of that many firsts. Shit, neither did I.

We were assigned roommates and suitemates alphabetically, and I had a corner suite, so there were six of us sharing two bathrooms and three bedrooms, with a common living space in between. Actually pretty sweet digs for high school kiddies. We weren’t allowed to bring TVs, and this was long before Al Gore invented the internets, so we were forced to socialize and actually communicate with folks. We were assigned two classes, one in our topic of study, and one general issues course, where we learned about granola shite like global warming, pollution and the kinda thing you’d expect overachieving high school braniacs to learn about.

My course of study was called “The American Autobiography.” I got stuck in that when I missed the cutoff for the Creative Writing course. We’re kinda back to that missing deadlines thing, aren’t we? We read autobiographies of Americans from multiple different cultures and studied how their American experience was different from our generally lily-white one. I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, I know why the Caged Bird Sings, and all sorts of other eye-opening material for this cracker from Bullock Creek, SC.

But what I studied was irrelevant. What I learned was far more important than that. And I’m not only talking about the fact that our Global Issues instructor was a sex therapist and drew us detailed diagrams of the female genitalia and told us how to find and properly treat the clitoris, knowledge that my girlfriend and I promptly went back to the dorm and practiced.

What was important to me was being somewhere new, somewhere that I had no baggage, where no one knew me and I could reinvent myself. Somewhere that I didn’t have to be weird or geeky (I still was), but somewhere that I could be and do whatever I wanted. It’s the most free I’ve ever felt, and the group of people I surrounded myself with that summer are still dear to me, even though it’s been a decade or more since I’ve seen any of them. Funky Cold Adina, Ryan Hauck, Ken Shabel, Angela Hansen and the rest are all warm memories to me. Memories of the summer when I realized I didn’t have to be what anybody expected me to be. I could be whatever the fuck I wanted to be, and if that was “cool,” so be it. If that was “weird,” so be it. Whatever I was, that’s what I was gonna be. So be it.

That was the first time I ever felt like I was accepted. I had always been the brainy geek kid, but there, surrounded by a fuckton of people smarter than me who gave way more of a shit about school than I did (I had officially the lowest class ranking and GPA of any Governor’s Scholar that year, a fact that I am inordinately proud of), I was accepted for myself.

That summer changed me as much for the positive as the heartbreak in yesterday’s post changed me for the worse. It’s interesting to look back every so often at what I think are turning points, times that helped make me who I am, or at least who I might be if I ever manage to grow up.

If you were there, I'd love to hear from you.