Notes From a Formerly Unpromising Young Person

In 2007 my email inbox dinged with a name I recognized but hadn’t seen in more than 20 years. I was living at the time in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, working as a journalist. I recorded stories from across Southeast Asia for public radio and was about to publish my first book. The email’s sender said he’d wanted to reach out to me for a long time. He was retired and was driving a camper through the West and Southwest United States with his wife. And he’d never forgotten me.

His name was Jim Dollinger. Dean Jim Dollinger, if you want to be professional about it. For two years, he watched the implosion of my dismal high school career from his administrative perch as dean of students. In the email, he said he’d followed my work in the two decades since, reading some of my early writing in The Chicago Tribune, where I got my start, and every now and again he looked me up to see what I was up to.

And then he apologized. He apologized to me. He said he felt the school had failed me. “Schools just didn’t know what to do with kids like you in those days,” he wrote; they weren’t equipped to deal with my situation.

My situation was this: I was finishing my sophomore year of high school and had probably attended fewer days than I’d missed. I’d failed nearly all my classes, and my transcript boasted a 0.47. (I say “boasted” because you really do have to miss quite a lot of school to fail so spectacularly.) Then there were the fistfights. The weed. The acid.

All of this was the public face of my private hell. My mother died when I was 8, and my father remarried quickly, moved us across the country and enrolled us in a religious school, throwing my brother and me into physical and emotional chaos. My new family and those in our social circles used the scrim of evangelicalism to justify or ignore stunning levels of abuse and violence. My response to this was to fight back, to sneak out, to do whatever drugs I could corral, to fight, to flee. Once, I sat on the floor in front of my father slicing at my wrists with a fishing knife.

But it was the suspensions that did me in at school; more than seven in a single academic year doomed you. And I had well over seven. I might have had 17.