Terribly, terribly wrong

Colorado was my only option after just about everything in my life went terribly, terribly wrong.

How romantic.

There were very few students in my high school doing worse than me. My first semester, I couldn’t hit a 1.0 GPA while my friends were taking home 4.0s like it was somehow easier than middle school. They took to it like fish in water. I couldn’t find several of my classrooms. It was the kind of place where kids fell through the cracks, and for someone who didn’t want to be found, that proved convenient.

I suspect that a lot of the time, I annoyed Warren Sprouse. An intellectual, a Serious Man™, the teacher who had a guy that put those little elbow patches on blazers. I was a goofy kid from a lower middle class family that asked the kinds of gotcha questions that had to rankle someone who valued semantic perfection.

Naturally, we were stuck with each other. And his debate class was the only thing that was keeping me afloat.

For the uninitiated, high school debate is one of two things: a series of thoughtful and impassioned speeches about the virtues of Ideas or four kids reading small bits of news clippings taped onto pieces of paper like they’re Twista¹ for an hour.

I did the latter. It was the perfect extracurricular for kids who hyperfixated because the work never ended. You sourced periodicals through LexisNexis, cited your sources, arranged them onto 8.5x11s, photocopied until you had to Office Space the machine. The Debate Lab became my second home.

It also represented a real path to college. My grades certainly weren’t getting me there. A year into it, I was on the traveling team and was regularly talking to the Poli Sci undergrads that were going to work at think tanks and law firms and engage with the type of wealth that I had only seen glimpses of. Wealth was like a bra to high school me: entirely a mystery.

I was a good, not great, debater. I suspect it was because I was not doing enough of the Just Apply Yourself, but my partner and I weren’t pushovers. And I was trending in the right direction. My junior year, there was word I would likely be getting an invite to the prestigious debate camp at Northwestern. No clue how we’d pay for it, no need to worry about that now. I had bigger problems.

Would it shock you to know that the environment was… toxic? Warren was smart and thoughtful, but also a little wry and detached. Pranks and hazing were neverending, and I was a common target. I could guess it was for reasons that flatter me (tall, unconventionally attractive in the “interesting” way that drew ire from a decidedly less attractive cohort of debaters) or more realistic (a smartass who failed upward) but why isn’t the point. Nobody stepped in. We dealt with each other as we saw fit; that was the culture.

(a quick digression)

Debate was not cheap. There was extensive travel across the midwest and you needed to look somewhat acceptable, which meant replacing dress clothes for a kid who grew erratically towards 6’3” over the course of a few years. You needed tubs for your evidence and, if you were lucky, a cart.

The cart was critical.

You spend enough time lugging 30 pound tubs of your evidence around in your Sunday Best and you yearn for a hand truck. In my third year, I finally convinced my mom that this was a medical device. A single mom working at a church wasn’t one to tolerate splurges.

I had a stupid amount of joy around finally having my own. Maybe it felt like a class thing: “Hey, look at me, the person who also has the thing everyone else treats as an afterthought.”

That was my first mistake.

Bullies see joy as a personal affront. They see a good time as an opportunity to restore the balance. So when I walked down the hallway to see my cart destroyed, two upperclassmen taking a type of pleasure in it that I’d say bordered on obscene, I broke down. It broke me.

Weeks later, I was thrown off the debate team. The guys who destroyed my cart were in the finals of state and I leaked to their opponents that they might be running a Secret Case. It was wrong of me. I did not care. Those guys were not my teammates. They were ghosts.

Losing your shot at college and your north star in your junior year is not great. I fell in with the Bad Crowd they warn you about and smoked too much weed². My friends became increasingly distant as my old life faded away with them. If you thought I was bad at school before, I was setting world records for apathy at this point.

And then, I was saved at Lindale Mall.

My mom brought me to a modeling open call, seeing something in me (as she often did) that I did not see in myself. You don’t notice that you’re suddenly a tall, skinny kid when your life is collapsing around you. The agency was scouting after having some success discovering a local kid named Chris that was doing big national campaigns. You might know him by his middle name: Ashton. Ashton Kutcher.

Anyway, they liked me. The story (or non-story) of my modeling days is for another post. The TL;DR is: I got an agency, was asked to drop out to go to Milan for the season, and I could not drop out fast enough. Milan was largely a bust and I putzed around NYC for a month not booking anything and listening to a lot of bootlegged Wu-Tang and Beatnuts albums I bought on Canal Street. I left in August 2001.

One month later, the world changed.

The story of 9/11 is for another post. The world of fashion ground to a halt and I no longer had job prospects, college prospects, or really an identity outside of high school dropout in Iowa.

Everything had gone terribly, terribly wrong.

I couldn’t get hired back at my old job at The Gap, as that would have been too cliche for any of the parties involved, but I was determined to graduate. This meant alternative school.

There are a lot of frankly ugly things people think about “alternative” high schools and I had every one of those stereotypes burned into my subconscious. Drugs (which I was excited about) and teen moms and, I don’t know, gangs?

Here’s the word I didn’t know: acceptance.

The teachers I met there were the definition of “meet them where they are” on a daily basis. They cared. They checked in. They filled the cracks kids fell through. They gave you their first name.

Mike Cervantes was an organizer who got me involved with my first campaign. Daws knew I couldn’t do math (failed Algebra 1 three times, thank you very much) and liked weed, so he taught me about the numbers behind tessellations. Chris Cronbaugh gave me On the Road and changed my life.

That book introduced me to Colorado.

Sweltering summer nights and jazz clubs and the kind of devil may care attitude that comes with new beginnings. It was a book that found me at the perfect time in my life, as many of Chris’s suggestions did as we kept in touch over the years. I don’t think I had seen a picture of Colorado in my life. I didn’t care.

When a “College” recruiter visited us the next month and promised me a “full ride” scholarship to any of their various campuses³ I clocked Denver on the list. I graduated. Two months later, 19 years old, I stepped off an Amtrak at a very different Union Station with one suitcase, into a decidedly not sweltering February morning in Denver. But, like Sal Paradise, I got snow-capped Rockies beneath the bluest sky I’d ever seen.

And I never really left.

Denver was a place for a kid who had washed out of just about everything to try again. It was wide open, it was the platonic ideal of the west, it was just isolated enough to feel like you could get your footing when you stumbled.

I don’t think that same kid shows up here and makes it.

Maybe we can figure out how to fix that together.