Schooling can be a painful costume to wear, even when it fits you comfortably - but especially when it does not. My first learnings were considered alternative (at least by me!); when I was entered into public school I found the entire experience totally surreal, and for a period of years I believed that I had initially been homeschooled by two jellybeans and a dead cricket.
After a couple of years I managed to readjust my psyche to more closely resemble the mainstream definition of reality, and I reluctantly slipped uncomfortably back into the world of three dimensions.
Consequently there were periods of promise coupled with failed attempts at advancement. For an art assignment in Grade Four I invented a character named Crazy Face and I set out to chronicle his adventures. His features were all misplaced - there was an ear under his chin; one eye watered and twitched, tragically rooted as it was deep in his hairy scalp. On his forehead was mounted his sizeable nose; but upside down. In his first adventure circumstance drew him outside in the rain; as he stood in contemplation of the various possible motives of his foe, his lungs and sinuses filled with water and he drowned in the gutter, unmourned. My teacher, uncharacteristically progressive in her attitudes, gave this effort an A. A classmate who had seen me writing and illustrating this story turned in a cheap knock-off of the idea for his version of the assignment. He was flunked.
In this manner a curriculum vitae was established. An obsession with hideously obscure comic book characters fueled my attempts to become a modern-day Cowboy Sahib, a minion of the Old West who was inexplicably transplanted to India and placed on the back of a tiger. This was ill-conceived literature from the early 1950s and now no one understood. Instructors took one look at this approach and promptly tried to get me interested in playing the trombone.
Instead I made up musical groups overtly alternative in nature (at least one had some members that were animals), and placed myself in them. There were many, all with enigmatic names such as The OOAs and The Killin' Kousins. I had no musical talents, I played nothing. But these "rock bands" produced long-playing albums by the dozen (made by me, from cardboard and paper) and scores of "songs" were composed (blocks of lyrics crudely written on lined notebook paper).
These songs had tunes, melodies; however, these existed only in my mind and could never be performed or reproduced in any way. There were one or two that I proclaimed to be modest hit records. But most did not sell very well in my imagination. My bands were always one-hit wonders at best, unrecognized instant has-beens in most cases. Admittedly, it is hard to reach a mainstream market when your drummer is a dachshund.
As I continued on my own fragmented path towards furthering my education, there were other accomplishments that I can still remember: a complete twenty-four volume set of encyclopedias (called the "Monkey Time Encyclopedia set"), which was produced twice - the original set and a revised edition the following year. These were more dictionaries than encyclopedias and were composed of bizarre made up facts and insulting characterizations of people and places both real and imagined.
Shortly before I was lifted from the cow pasture and taken off into the netherworlds of space by giant alien squirrels (as it turned out, these were just some ornery seniors from the football team), I produced a series of stories based very loosely on the "Dick and Jane" characters from the primary readers series that was routinely administered to typical first and second graders as a tool for establishing reading skills. My illustrations for these generally reflected the work of a soul in excruciating physical and emotional torment; the stories themselves dealt with illicit drug use, prostitution, and petty theft - perpetrated by Dick, Jane, Sister Sally and so forth. Sally was also a fan of blues music from the South Side of Chicago.
In the dark dresser drawer of my mind, the pair of now-melted candy beans had mostly disappeared by this time, and the desiccated cricket was unmoved by the efforts which I had made on his behalf -- attempts to honor his earlier work with my burgeoning intellect. High school loomed, and there was talk of allowing me to be tested to see if I could qualify for possession of a driver's license.
And then I decided to go to the local country doctor and inform him that I had become an insulin-dependent diabetic. But that is quite another story, for another time.
