fairlylucid

I’m at Hooters. It’s trivia night. Around me, a table of people are laughing, reveling in the in-jokes and sarcastic judgements that come so naturally to teenagers. I’m having a panic attack, because I know they’re laughing at me. Why else would this guy have brought me if not to offer me up as a sacrificial loser, target practice for everyone’s verbal slings and arrows? It’s happened before. I am 15, and I will never fall for this again.

In the summer of 1999, between my freshman and sophomore years of high school, I attended a summer program called CTY. Run by Johns Hopkins University, the Center for Talented Youth was a camp for kids who scored well on the SAT in seventh grade. Yes, that SAT. Hence the name: nerd camp.

Do some cursory googling, and you’ll find pages, listservs, entire wikis devoted to the culture of CTY–the songs and traditions that defined the adolescence of a generation of modern geeks. CTY was the one place, they say, where they could truly be themselves. They made lifelong friends. They lost their virginity.

Among these die-hard CTY alumni, it’s generally accepted that the Lancaster campus, my campus, was the cultural mecca of the program. It was in Lancaster that songs were first enshrined into the “canon,” an eclectic playlist of music which, as these websites would have you believe, can bring nostalgic tears to any eyes fortunate enough to have gazed upon Franklin and Marshall’s Hartman Green. CTY’s Shema, the holiest jewel in its corpus of psalms, was American Pie.

Heck of a time, eh? It’s not every summer camp that can necessitate support groups for managing the post-estivation blues! And me? What effect did immersion in this bastion of awkward nerdiness have upon an insecure 14-year-old Jon?

I barely remember the summer.

I remember my class, at least. Theoretical Foundations of Computer Science. We sat for hours every day in a small classroom, learning about countable infinities and postfix notation. We were introduced to propositional calculus and LISP. I think I did well.

I remember my roommate, Stu. He was from Connecticut and liked Terry Pratchett novels. Our RA once told us all about the Blair Witch Project (neglecting, of course, to mention that it was a work of fiction). I attempted playing frisbee once or twice.

And that’s about it.

What the hell? How could I have missed out on the love and acceptance? The songs, the inside jokes? The sex, for chrissakes?

I’d like to believe that my summer was so incredible and transformative that, for the sake of my very sanity, I was forced to repress my participation in Monty Python-themed orgies. I’d like to believe that it would merely take a single visit to a bearded European psychoanalyst to bring the memories flooding back. He’d only have to play a few bars of American Pie on his piano (of course he’d have a piano in his office!) before I’d burst in: “Die! Die! Die! Die! Live! Live! Live! Live!”

Far more likely, however, is that I simply squandered my summer, held back by the more virulent ancestors of the same insecurities and fears that plague me to this day. I didn’t go out, I didn’t participate, and I didn’t make friends. I was so afraid I would be judged, that as a result… I wasn’t. I wasn’t judged to be nice, to be shy, or to be badly in need of someone to pull me out of my unimaginably well-armored shell. So while they sang dirges in the dark, I was alone in my room.

People often speak of painful memories. I can’t claim I don’t have a few myself. In my life, though, it’s generally the amorphous hollows where a memory could have lived that cause me the most grief. It’s hard to convey the feeling, particularly to those who live their lives boldly and unapologetically.

How does one describe a hole without knowing what’s supposed to fill it?

It’s a cool late-summer night, and I’m in the back of a Blazer. I’m drunk, as is my fellow passenger. (The driver, thankfully, is not.) We’re coming home from trivia night. Once our weekly tradition, it has become a rare, nostalgic indulgence, subject to the whims of our education and careers. As we wind our way down Skyline Drive, American Pie comes on the radio. We sing the whole song together, even though we reach his stop during the second verse. Arms pound against the upholstered ceiling of the SUV.

Then it’s over. He’s home, and then I’m home too. Seven years have passed since he brought me along to help free me from my fears and self-loathing. I pause at my doorstep before going in. I am 22, and I am grateful.