Part Four

One of the things that paralyzed me on the Gerry book was overthinking the concept of objectivity.

The fact of the matter is that there is no such thing as an objective biography; every choice I make about what to put in and what to leave out, every turn of phrase or word choice that shows up in my prose, is a reflection on me and my biases, my agenda.

I got around this problem in the first two and a half books by pretending it didn’t exist. Halfway through Racketeer I decided instead to embrace it. Which is why the thing reads like a cross between an NEH grant application and a Sports Illustrated profile.

Being objective about Preacher Haywood is even harder, since I’m in the story – a supporting role, on and off the stage early, but I’m there nonetheless.

Of course I’m not allowed to write a biography at all – that’s the deal, right? What I’m writing is NOT a biography of Preacher Haywood. It’s about how I prepared the archive that someone else will use to write a biography, if the insanely improbably occurs and someone gives a damn about Preacher Haywood a century from now.

So I can throw all objectivity out the window absolutely qualm-free, and talk about how Preacher and I came to be at the same place at the same time. It provides me with a rhetorical device to sneak in otherwise utterly irrelevant genealogical data about Preacher, too.

Let’s see:

I hated high school.

The classes, the teachers, the other students. The buildings. The schedule. The athletic teams, the student organizations, the clubs, the parties, the pep rallies.

In retrospect I see that there was an element of self-loathing in there, but when I was a teenager in south Jersey I wasn’t nearly so self-aware. I thought I hated high school purely on the merits.

The fact that my troglodyte older brother excelled at high school did not endear me to it any, either. DJ – Donald D’Alessio Junior – certainly wasn’t the guy you wanted to sit next to when taking a chemistry exam, but he was absolutely the guy you wanted next to you on your Friday night beer run. He was the best lacrosse and second-best football player at Brightfield High and managed to (just barely) maintain his academic eligibility.

He was a senior when I was a freshman. Abuse at his hands was somehow more reassuring than the abuse I suffered after he left. He was big and dumb and popular and I was scrawny and smart and a geek. The fact that he excelled at high school reinforced my disdain for it.

The fly in the ointment was that Jen was also good at high school. Jen is eleven months younger than me, so she was one year behind. Thus there was never a time when my teachers were not comparing me (unfavorably) to one of my siblings.

But DJ was – is – a cretin. Jen is smart. DJ is an asshole. Jen is a decent human being. Jen was also good-looking and popular. Jen was even a good tennis player. She possessed an innate grasp of the high school social milieu; she always knew the right outfit, the right haircut, the right hangout.

I could never figure those things out, and even if I did, I probably wouldn’t have followed through on them.

And to make matters worse, Jenny was always nice to me.

So anyhow the two of them were great at high school, and I sucked at it, and I hated high school.

I had maybe three friends. We smoked cigarettes and scowled a lot. We dressed in black and listened to The Smiths and The Cure. We weren’t goth, per se, mostly because we’d never heard of it; this was the early ‘80s, and goth hadn’t yet found our tiny South Jersey suburb.

(To add insult to injury two of my three friends started dating each other our senior year, and had the gall to seem really happy about it. The selfish bastards.)

There was exactly one adult there I didn’t despise.

My sophomore year I was sent to see the guidance counselor, Mr. Goldberg, by my English teacher, Ms. Pritzger.

He looked at her note and told me that she felt I wasn’t working up to my full potential.

Like I’ve never heard that before.

I remember that there were no windows and almost no sound at all in his office. I can’t imagine working in a place that deathly still.

Without looking him in the eye, I pointed out that Ms. Pritzger had a BS in Education from Fairleigh Dickinson – meaning she was barely qualified to compete in the Special Olympics, and certainly not qualified to evaluate anyone's "full potential."

He took out my “Tale of Two Cities” worksheet. The first question was ‘What is Madame DeFarge knitting?’ and I had written ‘this is the best of worksheets, this is the worst of worksheets.’ It was the only question I answered.

He asked if I thought one needed a masters in psychology to see that I could do a little better than that.

My guess is that I gave the typical articulate teenager response – I shrugged and stared at the floor.

Then he did something unexpected – he asked me to defend the answer. He saw that there was some truth to it, I suppose. So I told him: it was the perfect high school English worksheet – blue mimeo ink, no thought required, no room for nuance, very easy to grade while eating Cheetos and watching the Barbara Mandrell show.

For some reason – then, as now – I associate eating Cheetos with intellectual deficiency. The Barbara Mandrell thing speaks for itself.

And for the same reason, I said, it’s the worst of worksheets. It exists solely to prove that we’ve done the reading.

And, he wanted to know, had I done the reading? If so, prove it.

Now I was a sullen, insolent little prick. But I really had done the reading.

I told him that Dickens was a hypocrite. He considered himself a social reform but plainly had no true sympathies with the revolutionaries. Far more Edmund Burke than Thomas Paine. His sympathies are with the gentry, not the proletariat. Beautiful, sweet, long-suffering Lucie, versus certified sociopath Tatrese Defarge. Who, in the end, is killed by Lucie’s maid. The rich don’t even have to do their own killing in Dickens’ world.

Dickens talks progressive and but his heart is conservative, I concluded. He really doesn’t care about the politics, as long as the British upper-middle-class comes out on top.

I felt pretty smug. I’d proved that I read the book and I proved I was smarter than Ms. Pritzger at the same time. Of course I’ve had bowls of chili that were smarter than Ms. Pritzger.

Goldberg thought about it for a moment. He told me he was supposed to give me an IQ test and an MMPI, but he wasn’t going to, because he already knew what they would reveal: that I was a smart kid, but a giant pain in the ass.

That wiped the smirk off my face. I wasn’t used to teachers talking to me like that.

He asked me if I had any chores around the house. A lot, I said. In retrospect, not really. I had to empty the trashcans and carry the bags to the curb each week.

But going to English class shouldn’t be a chore, I said, thinking I saw where he was going.

He said, sometimes the trash bag breaks and garbage spills all over the floor, right? Making that chore a lot more difficult than it should be.

I repeated, why should going to English class be like taking out the garbage?

And he said – I remember it distinctly -- “Jesus, don’t be so self-centered.”

He meant Ms. Pritzger, he said. Every time you pull something like this, you’re the human equivalent of a broken trashbag in her classroom. I want you to just sit there, keep your mouth shut, and smile pleasantly. “Be a good little trashbag,” he said. And in return I didn’t have to do any of her worksheets, turn in any of her papers, take any of her tests. Just do the assigned reading and be quiet in class.

I jumped at the chance. The downside was that Mr. Goldberg was going to develop his own tests on the same material. Just for me. I went to his office to pick up the test packet after each unit. They were take-home exams. It sometimes took me a week of research and outside reading to complete them.

More than two decades and a Ph.D. later, I’ve never yet taken a class as difficult as my 10th grade English class. But having a guidance counselor bust my balls while taking repeated graduate-level English literature exams was (sadly) the best time I had in high school.

So anyway, hating high school as I did, I was determined not to go to a college that was at all like high school… and from my perspective, most of them were EXACTLY like high school, only bigger. DJ was at Penn State, warming the bench for the football team and doing OK on the lacrosse team and struggling with the challenging dual majors of Binge Drinking and AIDS Jokes. And Penn was just high school writ large – you filed into a room to have someone spout information at you, and at the end of the semester you dutifully regurgitated it back into a blue book. The beautiful people formed cliques and didn’t talk to the likes of me. And everyone cheered at the pep rallies.

It took me awhile to find out about St. John’s College. This was a college that was sort of an anti-high school. You read the Great Works of the Western Canon and then you formed small groups led by professors they called “tutors” and you talked about them. You didn’t have to master Latin or Greek but it helped. The hard sciences were taught in hands-on labs. There were no “majors.” Everyone graduated with a Bachelor’s of Liberal Arts. There were no grades; you moved on when the faculty decided you’d mastered the material.

There were no intercollegiate athletics of any kind. Now, years later, I have a hard time expressing just how important that was to me.

My parents – a plumber and the daughter of a plumber – were a little hesitant at first, but the St. John’s people helped persuade them. They pointed to the enormous percentage of graduates that went on to graduate school (without dwelling on the reason why: your St. John’s bachelor’s degree didn’t provide you with much in the way of marketable skills, so you sort of HAD to go to graduate school unless you were independently wealthy). And we went to Annapolis to see the campus and it looked like my parents thought a college should look – big old buildings, grassy expanses, thick-boled trees.

So in the fall of 1985 I found myself there on the banks of College Creek, ready to put all of the unpleasantness of high school behind me.

All I knew about my roommate was that his name was P. Haywood and he was from San Diego, California.

So I get there on the first day and my parents and I walk into my third-floor room with armloads of crap and there, sitting on the other bed, reading Descartes and listening to what I later learned was Webb Pierce, was Preacher Haywood.