Starting high school is a big transition for everyone. For me, it was an even bigger one, and I was actually somewhat aware of it at the time. For nine years I attended Fairfax County (Virginia) public schools, and as high school approached, I assumed I would go to the local public school, W.T. Woodson, as my brother had and as all my friends would. But after a great deal of family discussion about my academic achievements, shortcomings and needs, it was decided that I would follow in the hallowed footsteps of my grandfather, my great-uncle, and various other males on the old Virginia side of the family. So in the Fall of 1987 I enrolled at the Episcopal High School in Virginia at Alexandria.

Coming from generic suburbia, I found that this 148-year-old all-male boarding school, considered one of the two most "socially acceptable" in the South (see The Preppy Handbook for credentials) almost overwhelmed me with the strength of its character. It was the oldest high school in Virginia, and had that sense of tradition only old Virginia institutions can muster. My classmates were largely "good old boys," though of a decidedly different socio-economic class than the Dukes of Hazzard -- the "sons of success," as one Washington Post article called them. They liked huntin' and fishin', but they wore Brooks Brothers and drove Mercedes-Benz.



This broad-brush portrait does not, however, show the interesting detail that was one of my freshman roommates, Heyward Coleman. Though on paper a fairly typical student of The High School (a legacy from a family with ancient roots in Charleston), Heyward had slightly unconventional aesthetic sensibilities and a certain rebellious habit of mind that set him apart. It was from Heyward that I got my first exposure to R.E.M.

Hearing this "alternative" band from the college town of Athens, Georgia in the first weeks of my career at Episcopal had an unusually profound effect on me. Although I wasn't fully aware of it at the time, various forces were coming together that would help to shape my identity: the adolescent's paradoxical combination of the need for self-expression and self-definition coupled with the need for acceptance and assimilation, my heightened awareness of my "alternative" school experience in a culture that was somewhat foreign to me, and my emerging literary interests.

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