The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

year passed, then another, then another, and the world and Ms. Price and Brian Warner and the prostitutes who were born again were still there, I felt cheated and lied to.
    Gradually, I began to resent Christian school and doubt everything I was told. It became clear that the suffering they were praying to be released from was a suffering they had imposed on themselves—and now us. The beast they lived in fear of was really themselves: It was man, not some mythological demon, that was going to destroy man in the end. And this beast had been created out of their fear.
    The seeds of who I am now had been planted.
    â€œFools aren’t born,” I wrote in my notebook one day during ethics class. “They are watered and grown like weeds by institutions such as Christianity.” During dinner that night, I confessed it all to my parents. “Listen,” I explained, “I want to go to public school, because I don’t belong here. Everything I like, they’re against.”
    But they wouldn’t have any of it. Not because they wanted me to have a religious education, but because they wanted me to have a good one. The public school in our neighborhood, GlenOak East, sucked. And I was determined to go there.
    So rebellion set in. At Christian Heritage School, it didn’t take much to rebel. The place was built on rules and conformity. There were strange dress codes: on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, we had to wear blue pants, a white button-down shirt and, if we wanted, something red. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, we had to wear dark green pants and either a white or yellow shirt. If our hair touched our ears, it had to be cut. Everything was regimented and ritualistic, and no one was allowed to stand out as better than or different from anyone else. It wasn’t very useful preparation for the real world: turning all these graduates loose every year with the expectation that life will be fair and everyone will be treated equally.
    Beginning at age twelve, I embarked on an ever-escalating campaign to get kicked out of school. It started, innocently enough, with candy. I’ve always felt a kinship with Willy Wonka. Even at that age, I could tell that he was a flawed hero, an icon for the forbidden. The forbidden in this case was chocolate, a metaphor for indulgence and anything you’re not supposed to have, be it sex, drugs, alcohol or pornography. Whenever they showed Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory on the Star Channel or in our rundown local movie theater, I would watch it obsessively while eating bags and bags of candy.
    At school, candy and sweets—except for the Little Debbie snack cakes on the lunchroom menu—were contraband. So I would go to Ben Franklin’s Five and Ten, a neighborhood store that looked like an old soda shop, and load up on Pop Rocks, Zotz, Lik-M-Stix and

    those pill-like pastel tabs that are glued to white paper and impossible to eat without digesting small shreds of paper as well. Looking back on it, I gravitated toward candies that were the most like drugs. Most of them weren’t just sweets, they also produced a chemical reaction. They would fizz in your mouth or make your teeth black.
    So I became a candy pusher, peddling the stuff during lunchtime for as much as I wanted because no one else had access to sweets during school. I made a fortune—at least fifteen dollars in quarters and dimes—in the first month. Then someone narced on me. I had to turn in all my candy and the money I had made to the authorities. Unfortunately, I wasn’t kicked out of school—just suspended.

    My second project was a magazine. In the spirit of Mad and Cracked , it was called Stupid . The mascot was, not unlike myself, a buck-toothed, big-nosed kid with acne who wore a baseball cap. I sold it for twenty-five cents, which was pure profit because I copied the pages for free at the Carpet Barn, where my dad worked. The machine was cheap and worn down, with an acrid, carbonlike odor, and it never failed to smear all six pages of the magazine. In a school starved for smut and dirty jokes, however, Stupid quickly caught on—until I was busted again.
    The principal, Carolyn Cole—a tall, slouched, prissy woman with glasses and curly brown hair piled on top of her birdlike face—called me into her office, where a roomful of administrators were waiting. She thrust the magazine into my hands and demanded that I explain the cartoons