Microfiche

I went to three high schools as a kid. My first high school wasn’t ideal, but it was notorious (at that time) for putting athletes into D1 schools like Texas, Miami, and Oklahoma State.

There were some good looking chicks there, some of whom were starting to warm up to me.

Right before the summer of my sophomore year, my mom told me that we’re moving in with her boyfriend and that they were probably getting married. I would have to move with her to Dallas. 

There were only about two weeks left in school, and my pony league team was a game or three away from clinching our league title which to me was the only justification for being a platoon player. We’d already moved across town by the last game of the season. I spent all summer waiting for a trophy to be mailed to our new address (Spoiler alert: it never arrived). 

My second high school was two bus rides away from our new place of residence. I enrolled using a friend of the family’s address because this DISD school was better funded and had a better baseball program than the one down the street from us. Their mascot was the Longhorns and all their school swag was based off of the University of Texas uniforms. The school was this old derelict set of buildings in the middle of North Dallas. Attending school there was like being an extra in a John Hughes film, except we had metal detectors that we had to pass through every morning before class.

As a high functioning autistic kid, I was very much out of place. The white kids were from old money families and wore sweaters around their waists and shoulders and were not very friendly.  There were lots of other Black kids who bussed in from other parts of Dallas, some of them were cool, some of them not so much. I could never tell if their ragging on me came from a place of caring or abuse. But I remember that sometimes after lunch, I would look up from the bathroom mirror and see large groups of kids gathered at the door making fun of me because I was brushing my teeth. 

My only friend was a skater kid from Texarkana who lived not too far from the school (by the Blockbuster music on Marsh Lane). He ended up being a real cool kid. His mom had gigantic boobs and his dad had a sweet entertainment room with a drum set and a bunch of Beatles posters. He and I only had PE together, the rest of the day I was on my own. There was a nerdy kid named Mike who I talked with in my debate class, but he was a 49ers fan, which to me was a non-starter. Despite our rapport, this was something neither he or I could get past.  

There were some kids in my communication class who were fun, but by the time I’d gotten to know and like them, the semester was ending. I hated going to that school, hated waking up at 5:45 to catch the bus, and hated being at my new home with my soon to be stepfather and increasingly dismissive mother. 

The only time I felt comfortable was when they were sleeping, at home. I didn’t realize how stressed I was until I started crying when my dad yelled at me during a driving lesson. One of the few things that he did right was offer me the chance to live with him and his family–my stepmother and their son–my half brother–9 years younger than me. 

The only things that got me through that semester were the Spice and Playboy channel, MTV (specifically Beavis and Butthead) and the school library. Every free second that I had was spent in the school library using the microfiche machine where I would look up old Sports illustrated magazines and read them until I had to go back to class or my eyes started hurting. 

I would look up old magazines as far back as the 80’s reading up on the Miami Hurricanes Football and Michigan Fab Five era basketball. My English teacher could tell I was catching hell in her class and she was gracious enough to let me leave class after I hurriedly finished our daily assignments (typically the first to turn stuff in). 

Looking back, W.T. White wasn’t all that bad (there were worse public schools in the metroplex), but I don’t think I would’ve done well enough to stay academically eligible– even if I had made the baseball team. Algebra was busting my ass, and sometimes physical science, too. Funnily enough, the school that I graduated from was also the Longhorns, but their color scheme was more similar to Texas Tech (at that time). My dad lived out in the sticks (at that time) and this was one of two houses on his block. It wasn’t ideal, but I survived, and even managed to make some friends that I still have to this day. 

Even though I would live with my dad for nearly 3 years, he and I never got as close as I’d hoped.  We both remain mysteries to each other up to this very day. My mother’s boyfriend ended up being a lot cooler than I originally gave him credit for, but by the time I realized this, he’d died of Lou Gehrig’s Disease (the first of many major losses for my mother). I would suffer a great deal of hardships in the oncoming decades, but things were never as bad as when I was 15 years old, feeling like all the adults around me were idiots, feeling like I had no control over my life, and having no idea what to do about it. 

BEF