Peter Gabriel

That was the last history class I took in high school, and upon completing it and my other courses of that semester, I took my rightful place among my graduating class, accepted the shower of honors and praise that fell upon me, and strode cheerfully into the void. The day after graduation, everything stopped. Being that Interlochen is a boarding school that attracts students from all over the world, the moment an academic year ends, the community shatters beyond repair. All of my closest and most precious friends were suddenly completely out of reach, scattered across the country. And the worst blow was the fact that, because I lived in Interlochen, I was still there after everybody left. I was still rattling around those sacred, haunted places where so much had happened and so many bonds had been forged. The emptiness of the campus mocked me and I slipped into a disorienting depression. On top of that, my mother and stepfather had grown used to me living in the dorm and had come to enjoy life without me in the house, and now I no longer belonged there either. I was constantly underfoot and in the way. They had recently formed a strong bond with some neighbors and would spend almost all day every day laughing and playing with them while I was conspicuously ignored. They had a favorite card game which could only be played with four people and would spend hours every night laughing and chatting over this game while I sat in my room, hearing the echoes of their joy and, through that, the echoes of my own dearly departed friends and feeling completely, hopelessly alone. The tension became unbearable and I ended up stealing the family car one day and driving it as far as I could until there was no sign left of Interlochen or my friends or anything that meant anything to me.

That summer dragged slowly by. I had a job painting cabins (and painting them all Chateau Brown), which I absolutely abhorred. I was going to college in the fall and I was looking forward to starting a new experience in a new environment (little did I know), but that was all in the future and everything else I knew and loved was all in the past. I was suspended in a strange twilight netherworld where nothing happened and nobody knew me. Time had stopped and I was stuck like a bug in amber.

Fortunately, I had Security and Roxy Music’s Avalon and Thomas Dolby and Trees and Nina Hagen to get me through that summer. I used to turn my stereo to the breaking point and scream along with Peter while leaping around the room. “The rhythm has my sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooul!”

The summer from hell did, of course, finally end and history creaked back into action as I packed up my things in a car and drove with my mother down to Chicago to begin attending classes at the University of Chicago – or, technically, the College of the University of Chicago. I knew before I graduated from Interlochen that I didn’t want to pursue my dance career any farther than I had. I enjoyed it, but I didn’t burn to dance – I didn’t need to do it in order to survive, and I knew from growing up around dancers my whole life that that was the only way to make it. The dancer’s life is so hard and so unrewarding (not to mention so short) that the only way to make a go of it was if it was truly the only thing you ever wanted to do. And that wasn’t the case for me. But it did leave a giant hole in my life as I was dancing five or six hours a day when I graduated. The sudden loss of such a strong focus played no small part in my disorientation that summer, to be sure, but I knew I had closed that particular chapter in my life and was ready for something else. But what?

Before devoting myself to dance, I had always been good at academics and enjoyed studying and learning, so I thought I would go to an academic college and try to rekindle that fire. Having spent ten years in the woods, I wanted to try living in a city for a change, but I didn’t want to be so far away that I couldn’t get home for the occasional weekend. Chicago was a natural choice and when the U of C offered me a generous financial aid package, my fate was sealed.

As we unpacked the car and brought boxes up to my new room, I was grateful that the summer was finally over and I could dig into a new experience. I was apprehensive to be sure, but at least I was doing something, I had a purpose and a focus and a reason to be there. After unloading all my boxes, I went out for a last dinner with my mom, bid her a tearful goodbye, and walked back up to my room to begin my new life and meet my new roommate. And I promptly jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Like most people, I am an onion. I have a public face and a private persona, and there are a lot of layers in between the two. When you meet me, you meet the outside of the onion. The better I get to know you and the more I come to trust you, the more layers I’ll peel off. Most people only make it past the first layer or two – very rare is the person who I’ll allow to see the naked little scallion within. It’s purely a matter of emotional survival and something I think everybody does to some extent or another. You don’t want some insensitive oaf stomping around on your psyche, so you tend to only show people as much of yourself as you can stand to have them destroy. The better the friend, the more of you they can destroy. But, hopefully, by that time they’re good enough friends that they won’t want to destroy you, so they’ve earned your trust (and, also, by that time you’ve worked your way under their skin too, so if they’re suddenly gong to start slashing and burning, you know where to strike back).

When I showed up at the U of C, I really needed a friend. And the first person I saw was my roommate, David. So I threw caution to the wind, pretended we already were friends, and peeled the first few layers off. David, as it turned out, was not worth getting past that crinkly brown paper-like surface, but it was too late, I had already flashed him my inner onion. He was an extremely uptight, terribly repressed academic overachiever (something I was soon to learn was pretty much a prerequisite for attending U of C) that came from that area just north of Chicago that, at the time, was the teenage suicide capital of the country. That community is the setting for Judith Guest’s Ordinary People – which had relatively recently been turned into a highly acclaimed film by Robert Redford – and which seemed to perfectly capture the awkward, pressurized family situation that spawned David. He was an honor student and an academic whiz and had spent his entire high school career buttering up his grades and résumé so he could get into a good school which would lead to a good grad school which would lead to a highly respected and financially rewarding career as a doctor or lawyer or something like that. You know, one of those guys.

In contrast, I was a dance fag from some artsy fartsy boarding school and must’ve gotten accepted into this prestigious college by blowing the Dean or something. Or so he seemed to think. And not entirely condescendingly, either. Although hyper-repressed, he was sexually curious and was excited to explore (and quick to deny) his homosexual urges and here I was, a dancer and everything. He was so fixated on appearances and stereotypes that it didn’t matter how many times I told him that I was more interested in girls than guys, the very fact that I was a dancer made me gay to him, and he propositioned me many times that semester – particularly when he was drunk.

The first big rift in our relationship happened during the first week. Being a very traditional school, U of C had a core of required classes. You had to take physics and you had to take calculus, among others, but they gave everybody a test in the first week to see which level of those classes you were best suited for. They warned you at the beginning of the multiple choice test not to guess if you didn’t know the answer, but by that time I had taken far too many standardized tests in my life to pay any attention to that advice. David was sure that he would do better than me on these tests because of all of his advanced placement classes and extracurricular academics (and here I was, some flaky dance fag after all), but I passed completely out of physics (laughable, since I’ve never taken it), and got placed in accelerated calculus while he was placed into what was affectionately known as Math for Trees.

As it turned out, getting placed in accelerated calculus was a big mistake as it was far too hard for me. I tried to get reassigned to a lower level, but my counselor thought I was just trying to shirk, pointed to my test score, and sent me back to class (which, ultimately, I passed with a D- because my teacher was too sympathetic to fail me).

Things rapidly deteriorated between David and me. He had apparently never met anybody like me – a guy who talked about his feelings and didn’t really give a shit about what other people thought – and fell in love with me. I, on the other hand, had never met somebody so repressed and scared and unwilling to confront his own interior life, and as soon as I discovered how fucked up he was, I tried to push him back out of my life. Hard to do when you live with the guy. He’d not only read my mail, he’d write in it. He used to like to sit on my bed while I was trying to go to sleep. Very relaxing. We got into terrible fights. He is the only person that I’ve ever met that I can truly say that I’ve hated. Not disliked, not disagreed with, but actively, passionately hated. Eventually, he came around and started hating me too.

But the problem wasn’t so much that he was so completely fucked up and held all the wrong values. The real problem was that, in the rarefied academia of the University of Chicago, I was the fucked up one. I believed in the power of art and of the absolute necessity of creative exploration and in the redemption of intimate (and not just in a sexual way) relationships. I was the odd man out. I had gone through the looking glass and everything that was good and right with my world had been turned inside out in this hostile, cold, dark landscape where numbers and formulas reigned supreme and the human element was regarded with skepticism if at all.

It was all very ugly and depressing and made me feel profoundly alone.