Head Case

by Cole Cohen

  Recently, he’s worked out a strategy where I am supposed to use a different colored pencil for each stage of the algebra problems he’s assigned me. I hand Denis my paper. He shakes his head slowly in disbelief; sweat rolls down from his ears to his neck. “It’s not just that you get them wrong. I can help you with that. It’s that you get them wrong in a different way each time.” Over the years that we work together, the shame that I feel from being unable to finish my calculations in front of the public school students swells as I wait outside Denis’s house for my dad to pick me up while the other teenage students with freshly minted licenses drive off.

  When I try to learn how to drive, the instructor tells me to think of the steering wheel as the face of a clock. Put my left hand at nine, my right hand at three. I stare at her with horror and decide to make a random guess. She repeats her instructions again and again until she forcibly takes my hands and places them on the wheel. “No, like this.”

  I keep taking my hands off the wheel as I turn the car, and then I place them back in an incorrect position. I don’t notice until the teacher corrects me. I make continuing attempts at three-point turns around the empty high school parking lot, until eventually our hour-long lesson is over. Next week, we do the same thing again. After about three lessons of this, she gives up.

  I take math lessons at Denis’s house from my second year of middle school to my high school graduation. In that period, I switch schools four times. My parents blame the school districts, saying that the West Coast public schools don’t compare to East Coast public schools. I receive what the neuropsychologists call “roller-coaster grades”—high grades in the subjects that I like (English, art) and low grades in what I hate (math, science). It’s not that I’m not trying; it’s that I don’t even know where to begin. Once a teacher marks me as disinterested, however, it becomes personal for both of us.

  My work with Denis prevents the district from holding me back a grade, a threat that looms annually. I beg my parents to put me in independent studies courses full time, but they say that I have to remain “socialized.” I argue that I’m not socialized, anyway, so what does it matter if I stay home all day? “That’s just the problem,” my dad says. “You would stay in your room forever.”

  1997

  Sacramento, California

  Halfway through my sophomore year of high school, in 1997, my parents take me out of public school and enroll me in Sacramento Country Day School, half an hour away. Since no one has been able to successfully teach me how to drive, my parents join the lower-school carpool circuit. In the mornings I’m loaded into some parents’ van with their middle schoolers and elementary school kids. I still go to Denis for math in the afternoon instead of taking math at the school. There are twenty-five kids in my new class, one of whom listens to Bikini Kill.

  I’m in the art room during free period working on a collage of a grasshopper destroying a city skyline when an older-looking bearded guy, closer to college age, shuffles in wearing a leather jacket held together by duct tape over a flannel shirt. He’s a couple of inches shorter than me; I can see the blond roots showing on the top of his black hair. Strapped to his back is an army duffel bag with a pair of chipped alabaster mannequin legs sticking out of it. Wordlessly, he begins reassembling the mannequin, his moss-green eyes signaling a surgeon’s intent. His hands are large and square, with chipped black polish on his nails.

  I try to look indifferent, but I’m nervously twisting glue off of my fingers as I watch him snap limbs onto a torso out of the corner of my eye. This guy is intense; he’s got a John Bender in The Breakfast Club thing going on for sure. I’m trying to figure out how to start a conversation with him when Minerva, the best artist in the school and the head of our arty girl gang, runs into the art room straight for the guy, wrapping her arms around him. “Chaaarlie!”

  I know the name from Minerva’s mythical-sounding stories about her older brother, who lives in Seattle. “Charlie’s dating this girl, and she’s twins! Their names rhyme, and the only way you can tell the two of them apart is that one of the girls is missing a toe. And their dining-room table is a coffin! Isn’t that wild?”

  Charlie’s visiting from Seattle for the week, from what I can overhear. The siblings ignore me and dive into some kind of heavy conversation by the doorway. I pretend to focus on my collage, but I can hear scraps of it from the table where I’m working.

  “An emotional tourniquet. Do you know what a tourniquet is?”

  “Yes, Charlie, I know what a tourniquet is. God.”

  He notices me and changes the subject, pointing to the mannequin.

  “I brought this down from Seattle. Found it in a dumpster.”

  Later that night, Minerva calls me. “My brother likes you. He says he likes something you did with your hands.”

  “He did? What did I do with my hands?”

  “I don’t know. He said that if he didn’t have scruples, he’d take you out for coffee. But he has a girlfriend. And scruples. Anyway, he’s not visiting for that long.”

  Minerva is the one who invited me to join our group of friends. My first week of class at Sacramento Country Day, I got lucky. The English teacher, Mr. Maisel, gave us the only creative writing assignment for the year, to write a short story. The next week he read sections of mine aloud to the class, praising it. “I mean, she can’t punctuate for shit, but the new girl’s really good.” In private school, the teachers can curse.

  After class, Minerva came up to my desk. “I think you’d be a good fit for us,” she said coolly. “You like theater, like Alice, and art, like me, and music, like Alex, and everyone likes Gladys.” Gladys is a year older than us and the toughest girl in school; she lives with the history teacher and his wife. If you don’t like Gladys, then you’re against her. Gladys is cool with me eating lunch with everyone in the art room.

  Minerva gives me a short story that she ripped out of a newspaper where the major plot point is that a woman accidentally flushes her keys down the toilet.

  “Read this. She reminds me of you.”

  Minerva’s boots are held together by silver duct tape, as is Charlie’s jacket. I’ve heard the rumors that Minerva is here “on scholarship,” as Charlie was before he graduated a couple of years ahead of us, that they can’t actually afford the school but that they’re so gifted that the school waives their tuition. Charlie was kicked out for stealing the keys to the school, and as a consequence he was forced to attend public school in Folsom, where his mom lives, for that year, but he was readmitted a year later. Everyone knows that Minerva is the best artist in school. We’re known locally as “the atheist school” among the other private schools, which have religious affiliations and uniforms. Both Charlie and Minerva are confident and magnetic, and I feel special that Minerva’s chosen me to be part of her group.

  Junior year my circle of friends has a blowout fight in the girls’ bathroom because Gladys doesn’t want Minerva’s boyfriend, David, to be part of our group’s plans for prom, which is held every year on a riverboat docked in the Sacramento River. “This is my senior prom, and I want it to be right.” I’m too intimidated by all of the yelling between Gladys and Minerva to open my mouth. Minerva doesn’t speak to any of us after that.

  * * *

  At some point during my junior year, Mobil downsizes, and, after having worked there for twenty-five years, my father loses his job in public relations. My parents work out a deal with my school where we pay month to month. “You are not to tell anyone about this,” my father says. “It’s for your own good.”

  Junior year is also the year when my parents decide that I need to update my neuropsych testing, since I’ll be applying to colleges the following year. My mother is still looking for an answer, for something more. My testing is covered by the Davis school district, since our house is there.

  * * *

  Psycho-Educational Report performed by the Davis Joint Unified School District of Davis, California (1998):

&nbs
p; Nicole is a mature, articulate young lady who is functioning in the superior to very superior range on tasks that involve overall oral language development, such as vocabulary, knowledge, and comprehension. In contrast, she scores below average on spatial organization tasks and in the borderline range on tasks of visual-motor integration. These disabilities have impacted her life dramatically as she has progressed through the educational system. It would be logical to assume that such a verbally articulate young lady would be able to make normal progress in all subjects; however, math and science are subjects that are typically adversely affected by motor-visual-spatial concepts.

  June 1999

  Sacramento, California

  In order to graduate from high school at Sacramento Country Day, I need a passing grade in chemistry. Despite my backlog of tests and phone calls from both my dad and the Davis School for Independent Study, I cannot circumvent this requirement. I meet with the chemistry teacher after school once a week, a sort of farce that we are both bound not to acknowledge. Mercifully, she grants me a D+, allowing me to graduate. Denis gives me a silver pen in a long box.

  After being rejected by thirteen colleges, I’m sent back to the school’s college counselor, who slides a pamphlet across the desk toward me. With its picture of a pair of feet standing in a river, it looks like an ad for some sort of “back to nature” hippie retreat. This is the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies, housed within the University of Redlands.

  The Johnston Center is a self-designed degree program with a “learning and living community” component. Most important, no grades are assigned.

  My dad drives down to Redlands with me to visit the campus and interview with the director. In keeping with the “living and learning” component of the program, the building where we’re meeting has professors’ offices on the bottom floor and dorm rooms on the second floor. It’s almost the end of the school year, and it’s deathly hot. The building is mostly deserted when we walk up except for a couple of students sitting on the front steps. We pass a large guy wearing a ratty Pixies shirt, his long purple hair up in two buns. Internally, I’m bargaining with any higher power that could prevent my dad from opening his mouth, but I know it’s a lost cause. I’m already preparing to take the hit of embarrassment when he says “Nice hair” to the guy as we pass.

  “Thanks, man.”

  I leave the campus with my acceptance letter in hand. I can’t believe that someone’s actually going to let me go to college.

  2000

  Redlands, California

  The Johnston Center for Integrative Studies was founded in 1969 by a group of young college professors who went into the woods to be greeted by a vision: an intentional academic living and learning community where each participant would be responsible for his or her own education. At the beginning of each semester, all of the students would write contracts between themselves and their professors for the semester, stating their individualized goals and intentions for the class, as well as any part of the professor’s previously established syllabus they wished to substitute or tweak. Students and professors would also have the opportunity to propose classes to be taught. Grades would be banished in favor of written evaluations. In turn, at the end of the semester each student would write a written evaluation for the professor. Students would come together once a week to discuss any living conflicts in the two adjacent dorms that would come to house them. These conflicts would be hashed out and resolved via consensus. No one would leave until everyone agreed.

  We hold community meetings once a week to decide on everything from the alcohol policy to how best to get rid of the rats in the shared kitchen. I write out a contract stating my academic intentions and how I plan to fulfill them—classes I plan to take on writing and theater, independent studies, special projects. My self-constructed degree is in “integrating writing and performance.” I contract to write and perform a solo theater piece as my thesis. Since I’m also in the University of Redlands Creative Writing Department, I’ll have to put together a poetry collection as well. Redlands is the host university. Johnston students are an independent entity, generally feared and loathed by the larger population of the university, but they are permitted to take the more traditional offerings of the larger university as they like.

  My contract goes to a committee of teachers, who meet with me to decide if it will pass. They make me add a science class, but otherwise I’m given the green light. Three years later, we will meet again. I receive written evaluations from each professor, and in turn I write a class evaluation for each of them. There is no structured math requirement.

  Redlands is home to a highly regarded music school, where I take so many music history courses that by the beginning of my junior year one of the professors pulls me aside to tell me that I’m already halfway to fulfilling a music minor. All that I’d have to do to finish it is sign up for music lessons; she suggests singing because it doesn’t require renting an instrument from the school. I’m a terrible singer, but I enjoy singing and I’d like to get better at it, so I sign up. I get along well with my voice teacher, an Austrian opera singer who only wears black. After my first private lesson with him, he says to me, “I sense that we share a certain aesthetic.”

  Despite singing “My Funny Valentine” over and over for several months, in the coed Johnston showers, in class, and in private voice lessons, I don’t improve much. Nevertheless, I rack up enough credits to earn the minor. This is a technicality, since Johnston doesn’t recognize minors, but it still feels like an accomplishment to me. My best friend, Matt, a natural musician, and I contract through Johnston and a Johnston-sympathizing music professor to make an album together. We call it Palm Fronds and Piano Wire. I don’t sing on it; I mainly talk and scream and bang on things.

  It’s difficult to let you between my headphones. Something here must remain mine. I don’t want to believe that what I can hear is the same as what you hear. I don’t want to know about anyone else needing music on such a carnal level. I need to believe that this is uniquely mine.

  In middle school I met a boy my age on the online message board service Prodigy; he sent me his tape of the Sonic Youth album Dirty after he got it on CD. Until then, I’d only heard my parents’ music—the Beatles, folk singers, jazz. At first, I didn’t know what that pealing sound was through my headphones; I just knew that I needed more of it. He told me that it’s called feedback; it’s what happens when you put a guitar close to an amp.

  Music is a basic staple. I need it to get up in the morning, to write, to navigate the world. It’s my main coping strategy because it helps me to move. Time collapses and with it any time-related anxiety, and my body is just a hanger for headphones and not a set of limbs to be negotiated through space. Music pushes me mercifully forward through what I need to accomplish.

  I don’t have an instinct to move my body in space in a beat, to dance, especially while navigating my body around other bodies. I can slow-dance with a partner because it’s not all that different from following someone else across a crowded intersection. However, my connection to music is deeply physical. The texture of sound travels through my internal circuitry, tumbles through my veins, and fans out to all of my limbs. It’s an out-of-body experience, yet this hyperawareness of my physical being as a conduit for sound is also the greatest sense of my own physicality that I have ever felt.

  I buy my first electric guitar for a hundred bucks from another Johnston student, using money from my summer job as a counselor at a theater camp. Learning is hard, and I have more than one built-in excuse to fail. At twenty-two, I already feel embarrassingly old to be awkwardly plinking and squawking away over an instrument most of my friends figured out in their teens. I am scared that I won’t be able to learn, more scared of the responsibility of learning. I am determined to try, though, because it’s hard for me to imagine that loving music as much as I do has nothing to do with actual musicianship, which is like thinking that I could be a great chef because I love to
eat.

  I never learn guitar, and when I graduate I give the instrument to Matt. Three years later, Matt calls to tell me about collaging the guitar with magazine cutouts. “It looks great! You’d really like it.” I feel a twinge of jealousy, but I know that the guitar is in its real home.

  My senior year, 2003, I take a class in alternative medicine to finally fulfill my science requirement. As part of a class demonstration, I’m hooked up to a biofeedback machine for the first time. Looking at my brain waves on a computer screen, the professor furrows her brow.

  “Do you have a history of depression in your family?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I say. “Why?”

  “Well, there are all of these spikes—we call them rabbit ears—in your brain waves.”

  I’m already seeing a local therapist and trying to blunt my moods with prescription antidepressants, sleeping pills, and antianxiety prescriptions. I am twenty-three; it would be easy enough to say that I don’t know my own mind yet, but with my brainwaves on full view I feel as if I’ve blown a secret by exposing instead of protecting my darker self. I have no way of knowing that my brain is keeping a bigger secret from me.

  By the end of senior year, graduating students at Johnston choose a committee of professors and peers who decide if their graduation contracts have been fulfilled. Upon completion, the students are granted a diploma in their own self-titled emphasis. Alumni have passed down to us that a colon in the title of your degree will help on grad school applications. Otherwise, anything goes. One graduation, I watched a woman receive a college degree in the supercalifragilistic world of art. Amy, my freshman roommate, graduated with a degree in global domination and went on to receive a masters in political theory from the University of Virginia. In May 2003, I graduate with a degree in integrating writing and performance.

  I approach the postcollege world delicately, like a bomb technician.