The new school at which I arrived in the fall of 1976 – Franklin County High in Frankfort, Kentucky – was a completely different experience than church and school had been in the past.
I’ve mentioned the story I had published in Perry Rhodan, and that Mr. Schenk had been impressed enough by it to have an award given to me. It was by way of that story that my completely different experience began.
I showed the story to my labmate Tracy in Chemistry class one fall morning. He immediately showed it to another kid in the back of the classroom – Jim Wampler, whom Tracy called Womp – who read it and began striking up conversations with me. Jim was an artist, you see, primarily a cartoonist, and had the same hunger for sci-fi and Trek and all the rest that I did.
Womp and I struck up not only a friendship but a partnership – I'd write and he’d draw. This was utterly new to me; up to this point, I’d been alone in my creative hovel, without close friends or like-minded community.
In Mr. Schenk’s AP English class, there was Joe – a tall, lanky, outspoken fellow whose brainy predilections equaled my own; in particular, he loved the Dune novels, and loved to talk about them.
And then there was Bob, who was earthier than the other two – but as big a Trek-loving nerd as I’ve ever met. Bob was especially fascinated with space - like me, a space program nut.
The four of us were at the core of a larger group – nerds all, and gender-inclusive. My neighbor Heidi and her bestie Susan might possibly have been even more Trek-happy than me and Womp and Bob and Joe. And there was Ann, who was not only as artsy as Womp but could handle a thread and needle, foreshadowing cosplay – as could Ruby, who was even brainier than Joe.
And along came Tom, from a neighboring school in the county next door – an artist like Womp, and quite a competent model-builder.
We went to the movies together. We made movies together, with Super 8 cameras, a la Spielberg, writing our own scripts, sketching our own storyboards, making our own costumes, designing and building model spaceships for special effects – all of it.
We all drove to Louisville together to hear Gene Roddenberry speak – a life-changer for us all.
We all turned each other on to the Beatles and Klaatu and Jethro Tull and Alan Parsons and Yes. We gathered at one another’s homes to watch Space:1999 and Battlestar: Galactica. Womp and I created comic books together. At Joe’s parents’ boatyard by the river, we’d cosplay and act out bizarre post-apocalyptic adventures.
My point (and I do have one): for the first 15 years of my life, I’d been isolated and alone – suffering through ADHD, not realizing why I was different from everyone else, just realizing that I was exactly that... drastically, painfully different.
Suddenly, I had a tribe. Suddenly, I belonged.
Suddenly, I was in a place where everybody was ADHD.
I overstate, actually; I’m pretty certain Joe wasn’t ADD. Womp, absolutely; Bob, probably. Ann, yup. Ruby – I now have my suspicions. The others? Can’t truly say. But it didn’t matter. Though I still had never heard the words attention deficit disorder, though I had no idea that I was genetically different from most – though I had no name for what set me apart, I now realized: these kids are just like me.
And that changed everything.
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