Vancouver, 2006/1970s —This past spring I worked with four friends from my 1984 art-school grad class ripping apart the innards of a decommissioned high school in North Vancouver and then reassembling the bits into something new. It was for an art installation called Vancouver School. The experience opened up some old wounds and healed a few. The five of us were given an entire school that was decommissioned in June 2005. There was still homework in the desks, and lockets and retainers in the lost and found bucket. It was like old New England, where entire villages vanished, their meals still on the dinner table.

The first two weeks in the abandoned school were Steven Kingy, but once the creepiness left it was like working inside my dreams at night, except it was real and I had control. I could literally, legally, artistically bash the crap out of anything that displeased me. At will I could mangle and trash lockers or AV equipment or uninspired textbooks. It was like being handed a superpower: the power to reconfigure the way I existed with my memories. Within a month, I was no longer having recurring dreams of trying to remember my locker combination or being late for a test in a class I didn’t even know I was enrolled in. Gone. Thank you, art.

In high school—Sentinel Secondary, West Vancouver, BC—I survived by being the smartest in the class. This was an overreaction to being born on December 30. The cut-off date in BC is December 31, and there was never anyone born on December 31 in my classes. Not only was I always the youngest in my grade, I was also small for my age. These days I tell people I was skinny, and they say, “Oh, ha, ha, skinny, yes, yes, right...” but then they see photos and say, “Oh my dear God, what a freak.” That skinny.

I say the smartest—well, basically smart, and yet not at all. High school wasn’t hard. I don’t think you have to be smart to get through high school. High school’s a reasonably easy-to-decode game. Half the people in my class could have finished the academic requirements by grade nine. I read these gee-whiz articles about home-schooled kids who “graduate” five years early and say to myself, “Yeah, well, duh.” I think high school is mostly about crowd control and keeping young troublemakers off the streets. Not that Sentinel kids were troublemakers. Back then, West Van was all sheepdogs and Volvos. Of 174 kids in the class of 1979, all but four graduated.

Here’s an idea: if you’re a thief at nineteen, there’s still a chance you can stop being a thief; if you’re a thief at thirty, you’re always going to be a thief. Society knows this. The longer it can keep you inside a big ugly concrete building, the less chance there is of your getting involved in aberrant behaviour patterns that will follow you the rest of your life. BC kids always felt sorry for Ontario kids because they had to go through grade thirteen, which we were taught was this total joke left over from the Depression era when they had to keep kids off the streets and out of the labour pool. An extra year of prison, suckers. Although in BC youre not allowed to skip grades. Zero possibility of parole.

There were quite a few kids who were gifted in my grade, and they went on to do gifted things. My gift was being able to ace tests. It’s not even a skill; its a headspace, like driving a car. After a few minutes you’re not even aware you’re doing it. And not once from kindergarten to grade twelve did I ever once do homework—not once. I’m proud of that. My parents never once attended pta meetings or a school event, and I never once brought school home. It was a total separation of church and state, and it’s not like it was planned—it just happened. What it gave me was a chance to develop a capacity for reflective thought and contemplation. Note: they did attend my graduation, and it was odd, like a being-back-in-high-school dream.

I think everyone evolved a survival strategy through school that was base and expedient and intense: jock, class clown, loser, stoner, nice, smartest kid in class...all the usual categories. I get jealous of the kids in schools now, because they have so many categories to choose from: goth, punk, gay, skater, nerd.... Today I found out there are three subcategories of goth. Wow. Mostly I remember cool and uncool. Was I cool No. Was I uncool No. I think if you ask anyone who knew me back then, they’d say that I invented the grey area in between. I spent five hellish years trying to avoid categorization, and dammit, it worked.

I used to flatter myself that because I could ace tests, I could somehow ace life—that I could go wherever I wanted in life with the same cynical sense of immunity. But four months of sawing through chalkboards and painting desks pink and chewing out the innards of 16-mm film projectors made me realize that was a lie. The truth is that in the final two years of school, I came within a breath of quitting maybe four or five times. I was so bored I felt I’d been clubbed by the world’s biggest dodge ball. I was desperate to jailbreak and hated every moment of grades eleven and twelve. Every moment.

I have no happy memories of that time, and I don’t know how I managed to repress those emotions these past twenty-six years. Ripping apart classrooms was like starring in a horror thriller where the patient with amnesia surrounding a brutal crime ends up being involved in further brutal crime—and remembers details of the first crime just in the nick of time.

But there is a happy ending to this story: on the very first day of art school I had a sense of coming home that I’d not once experienced from K to twelve. I loved every moment of art school. To this day, if friends with kids in trouble ask for advice, I tell them to send the kid to art school. A few times the advice has been taken, and it’s always worked out well. Art, you are my jackhammer. Art, you are my bulldozer. Art, you are the force behind the hands that allowed me to break out of jail.