ACCOZZAGLIA

Pick up from Part I

When I was in grade three, after finishing the standardized test everyone had to take, I was approached to take a special test, administered in an unallocated classroom in the far corner of our school. Around me were other hand-picked kids from my grade, our tiny population peppering across several classrooms under several teachers. The test was different than the norm; a lot of it involved pattern recognition, identifying correlations, making abstract analogies, and so on. Irene Yao, Nancy Seibert and Gina Applewhite — having met them all in grade one — were also tested.

A few weeks later, I was told by somebody — maybe it was my teacher, Miss Cerace, or perhaps it was the counsellor, Mrs. Wren — that I was “gifted”. I asked what that meant, but they couldn’t give me a conclusive, decisive answer beyond saying that I had “special talents”. Unfortunately, I never was given an adequate explanation. They also never gave me a test score. I guess that was for my own protection. Irene and Gina were told much the same. Gina’s parents removed her from school during grade four, because our school refused to move her ahead an academic year. They shopped her elsewhere, moving the family to a different neighbourhood just to make it possible, where she was given a chance to proceed learning at her own pace.

Back then, I wanted to design cars. Or licence plates. I was a weird kid, but up to then, at least I mostly got left alone.

But by grade four, that all changed. I was shoved into the a classroom where there were no other gifted kids. I wanted to be taught Mrs. Pringle (who got most of the newly tested gifted kids), but they put me into Mrs. Coan’s room instead. Mrs. Coan was new to this, having just moved up from substitute teaching the year before. She really wasn’t ready for prime time. She was endowed with a group of troublemakers from grade three who really didn’t care too terribly about learning anything useful.

I guess these days, they’d be called “high-risk kids”. I called them bullies.

Grade four was my first brush with hell on earth. That was where I learned the phrase “smear the queer”. Thing is, I always got to be the queer while the others mobbed and tackled me. I learned from the bullies how to get home in one piece, jumping fences to circumvent getting bum rushed by the unruly, tough kids on BMX bikes. That year, I got my first taste of what depression and chronic insomnia felt like. As a consequence, there’s remarkably little I am able to remember about the following nine months.

In grade five — making up for the horrible mistake of the previous year, the year I so desperately wanted to be in grade five instead of being held back in grade four — I dreamed of becoming a professional astronomer, maybe even an astrophysicist. My teacher, Mrs. Bertelli, was the person responsible with igniting my interest and fuelling my passion, encouraging me to go as far as I could. Since I lived amongst astronauts, who were common people in our community, I thought often and intensely about the possibility of becoming involved in astronautics. So did my best friend from down the street, Tom Prior, whose parents both worked for NASA. Having Judy Resnik inspire me with something as simple as a personalized autograph told me that if she could do it, then I would be able to do it, too.

Brian Odom and I were excellent friends, having met one another in Miss Cerace’s grade three classroom. We’d spend much of our recess time in Mrs. Bertelli’s class discussing time and space, matter and energy, and other elements of physical science. He played the cello and knew nothing about pop music, while I watched as much MTV and listened to as much radio as I could, because I was forbidden to learn to play something instrumental myself. After getting a telescope and taking it to class to show everyone an outstanding perspective of the 30 May 1984 annular solar eclipse, Brian was my hand-picked sidekick for the class presentation. I trusted having him above everyone else to help explain things far better than I could.

By then, I seemed tracked by my teachers to maybe become something or someone great.

In grade six, I wanted to be a programmer — what would be called a developer today. With my Commodore 64, I learned how to program basic things in BASIC. Much of what I learned I learned from Travis Hassloch and his Atari 800 system. It was at this house where I heard my first digital sound sample: a ten-second, low-bitrate, distorted sample of Sammy Hagar’s “I Can’t Drive 55″, which took us about 45 minutes to load from his cassette drive. It was also there where we’d spend lazy summer afternoons, flipping the Asteroids scoreboard on his Atari 2600.

Because of being inspired by him, I got overambitious at one point and thought I could develop a night sky mapping program on my own. This was long before I understood databases, libraries and query input methods involving calculations and subroutines beyond my reach. I aimed high and burnt out low. The constellation program was mothballed forever.

Before grade seven began, I fell into studying numismatics, or collecting coins. I’m not sure what started it. But I threw everything I had into it, because it was safe, it was an escape from domestic abuse, it was something I could absorb, and it was a place where my imagination for the unknown could run wild. It inspired me to sketch and draw my own designs with the intent to propose them to the U.S. Mint. It even inspired me to save up my babysitting, housesitting, lawn mowing, and car washing money to split the cost of buying a $50 bag of pennies from the bank and see what Tom Prior and I could find contained within.

But I still tried my hand on the C64 at being a system admin for my own bulletin board system. I used CNet v10.0, and I named my 300 baud BBS service “The Palace of Myridian”. It infuriated my parents that I tied up the phone line in the wee hours, and they refused to get a second phone line. Under threat of being grounded, I stopped that trajectory midway through grade seven. Within months, I never touched the C64 again.

Then, within a month after being punished for the phone line fiasco, and four days after Voyager II made its closest pass-by with Uranus, the Challenger shattered into millions of pieces, taking Judy with it. My dream to carry on with astronautics died that morning and in the ten months following as I replayed all the investigational data, drawing with coloured pencils the moment-by-moment lead-in to the catastrophe. My dream to carry on with astronomy and astrophysics was extinguished by a parent (my mother) who constantly told me that I’d never make money that way, that I’d be poor, and that I wouldn’t have a chance in hell.

Also in grade seven, I got the crap beaten out of me, was tormented by bullies at home and school, and got teased for collecting coins because my last name naturally lent itself to being associated with numismatics by changing one consonant. I was told by my mother that to any interest I dedicated myself was nothing better than an obsession, connoting that passion was unhealthy. Each day became less about learning and more about staying alive. Plus, by then, I knew I was really queer but didn’t know why, nor could I come out. That’s where TJ Spinks and I shared many of the same honours-level courses. He always treated me decently, even if personally we weren’t ever very close.

After being hospitalized for severe depression in grade eight, I assumed that my being a target for abuse was because I was a gifted learner. I had been in the honours tracking since grade three and was by no means a perfect A+ average student (which was hard enough with said violence in my life), but I looked by far the biggest geek ever. So, after that year ended, I asked to be removed from the gifted program. Perhaps if I was placed among the average class body, I reasoned, then perhaps I would be treated like a regular kid. Meanwhile, I pushed away all my peers — all those bolded names — so that people would regard me as approachable and just . . . un-intimidatingly average.

In grade nine, I decided I wanted to pursue being an architect. I took a general drafting class and loved it. The following year was architectural drafting, and I was excitedly looking forward to it. Unfortunately, I had to wait until grade eleven before my required courses were completed. During that bye year, the Texas public education system cut funding for technical arts funding (they were more interested in standardized testing scores than they were teaching kids by then; this strategy later became the groundwork for “No Child Left Behind”, incidentally), and the two drafting classed were merged. I still took the reshaped drafting class, but found it to be a monumental waste of time. It also extinguished my motivation to be an architect.

In grade ten, after over a decade leading up to it, I wanted to play the drums. But my parents would have no part in that. Since all other musical instruments were barred to me, I figured that all that rhythmically beating on pillows with secondhand drumsticks would get the point across. But it wasn’t to be.

Then I ran away during the last week of grade ten. I forever left all the peers I’d known — even if I was no longer allowing myself to be associated with them. The bullying, which was supposed to go away by dropping out of the accelerated academic program, actually got worse, and the kinds of violence against me only seemed to escalate, especially at home.

Just before running away, though, I met Katharine Mieszkowski, who was two years my elder and just days away from graduation. She was the first feminist I came to know. In such a short time, her strength, wit, and brilliance changed my life in such fundamental ways, though these seeds of self-empowerment wouldn’t manifest in me for at least another three years. She was someone who didn’t cow to being outside the in-crowd, didn’t denigrate herself to doing things to stay out of harassment’s way (I’m sure her ability to hold her ground and thumb her nose at convention probably left her alone, contrary to my trying to be what I thought people wanted me to be).

Years later, I wanted to be a creative director. Not because it’d been a lifelong dream, but because several people said I was good at being being a graphic designer and seeing the big picture. One of those people was D’Arcy Salzmann. He was already graduated from the University of Toronto when we first met and well on his way to becoming what will probably be him-as-CEO for a major global technology company. Our rapport was immediate; we were both once gifted kids, but he went in forward motion, while I kept running into debilitating quicksand, despite my most impassioned attempts to be cautious and deliberate with my ambition and determination.

Then, after accidentally learning the legal system from the inside out — by dint of being in the wrong place at the right time — I deduced (with generous encouragement from my counsel) that I could become an amazing civil law attorney, dedicating my specialization to human rights concerns. But was that really what I wanted, or was that merely something I could do well? No, it wasn’t what I wanted, because it would cut into many other dreams of mine that had been placed on indefinite hiatus for years, even a decade, only to be rediscovered in July 2004. Wouldn’t that be selling myself short?

And now, despite all these withered talents, these vestigial gifts, all these truly extraordinary life experiences (that I can’t ever freely tell everyone, because I’d be accused of making it all up, or that I’m a bigger freak than previously assumed before), I realize that I cannot find a way to pay for storage rent for next month, to buy my meds, or to even apply for university.

Despite applying left and right to service and retail jobs over the last couple of months, as well as to career opportunities galore, I’m faced with the very one thing I hate, hate, hate doing: selling off personal effects — what few I have left anymore — to cover my bases while I wait to be contacted by anywhere I’ve already applied. But nowhere is calling me — not the barista places, not the chain bookstores, not the advertising agency I interviewed with originally eight years ago.

I’m smart, I’m motivated, I’m determined, but I’m invisible. And it’s like I’m again getting punished for being off by just enough, like I’m cosmically mis-calibrated by one degree from my peers. It feels, at it always has, as if I am at fault for this poor calibration, paying my dues by dwindling my personal effects to where I have nothing left. That’s where it’s going. I mean, all I own to my name these days is an incomplete dinnerware set, a few books, a few posters, my music library, my computers, some threadbare clothes, and a fraction of my lifetime mementos. You could easily fit it all into the tiniest U-Haul truck.

I don’t need much of anything to live in this world, but parting with what little I have left (which is about 10 percent of what I used to possess) is both a letting go of the core of my physical existence (namely, the music library that I’ve painstakingly put together and curated since I was eight years old), as well as a kind of reprimand for being me. It’s as if I don’t know how to do anything right.

I feel really stupid right now. I feel really derailed from months of being genuinely optimistic. I feel really isolated, really angry, really feeling a grave sense of self-loathing and failure, and I don’t know exactly how or around whom to productively process any of it. I’m writing this for my own benefit here, because I can’t think of anything else that works as a constructive release.

My anger, which I’ve always kept away from people, the splendid internalizer I was forcibly raised to be, is bubbling under my surface right now like a pressure cooker. The meniscus of my cool façade is all that keeps the outside world from seeing the roiling disgust within.

WHY AM I NOT WANTED? WHY DOESN’T ANYTHING I DO WORK? WHY AM I SITTING HERE HURTING SO MUCH? WHY DO I KEEP TRUDGING FORWARD WHEN IT ALWAYS ENDS UP THE SAME WAY, WITH ME SCREWED BY FORCED, EXTERNAL DISEMPOWERMENT?

Help me.