Scott Anderson
The summer before my freshman year in high school mom enrolled me in a week-long workshop on organizational skills. This was the latest in a series of desperate attempts my parents made to will into reality the high hopes adults had for me. There had been special reading assignments to keep me engaged, rewards, threats, regular meetings with teachers, and ultimately ritalin, but my marks never rose above a pedestrian level. I was a nuisance in class, I hated homework, these were the facts, but my parents, god bless them, could not accept the child they felt was “gifted” was not on the Harvard track.
This brought me to Minuteman Technical High School in the first week of August, summer of 1999. I had met my mother’s initial announcement of my fate, back in June, with outrage and defiance: not only was it an unspeakable outrage to rob me of a week of summer, but this was at Minuteman Tech. Average student or not, I felt the revulsion of my social class at vocational education; Speds went to Minuteman - to even visit there would leave a stain my peers would certainly perceive on me. And in fact, I told none of them except for Blau what I was doing - Blau, who I can still remember arguing with my mother that this was a “remedial course” and that I was not a remedial person. Whatever that meant I agreed with.
The arguments came to no avail and I found myself one hot Monday morning in a squared off section of a rather large and impressive library, among a diverse group of quiet, bored people dragged off to this confinement. The person running the workshop was a kind, veteran teacher of the “squat with short hair” variety, one of those people made calm and numb through decades of speaking and sharing and getting only indifference in return. We talked about notebooks, color systems, note taking, task lists. In recent years I have learned one weird trick for making life less painful, and that is to assume people can teach you things if you try to find something, anything that you can learn from them. Because for the majority of my life I have approached all figures of authority assuming that they had nothing to offer, and feeling smug when proved right. Needless to say I cannot tell you much of what was said in those classes, and my grades in the fall did not improve.
I can tell you about the ride home. Mrs. Anderson, a friend of the family and mother of four, would already be at Minuteman the time my class would get out each day, and offered to drive me home. Mrs. Anderson (no I do not know her name) was a sweet woman with an edge of medicated tension, the kind of person who serves in the PTA and visits the supermarket as a social activity. Her son Scott was in summer school at Minuteman Tech after failing a few classes the previous year.
Scott Anderson was a tall, rectangular guy with large hands and gelled blond hair, baggy button downs and baggy torn jeans, that kind of thing. He and my brother Chris were close growing up, part of a group of boys who all played baseball together and had sleepovers on the weekends. Among all of them, Scott stood out as a natural athlete - he was so good at pitching that people were throwing around words like “scholarship” and “pros” when he was in middle school. Twice he took his team to the state championship, where the opposing team would just hope that arm of his would tire out. Then, early in high school, it ended: he just up and quit.
The Anderson house was one of those domestic situations whose memories give you confused pause as an adult. There were four kids, the first two adopted, the second two being Scott and Chris, the youngest, who I hung out with for a while and then didn’t. I remember being scared of the oldest, a lacrosse player, and in fact I’m still scared of lacrosse players. I remember screaming fights with the second oldest, a daughter, but I don’t remember the content of the fights. It was a large house set back in the woods, and there was something off inside it.
The first thing Scott did when he got into the front seat of the car, where I was already waiting in the back and making painful conversation with Mrs., was roll down the windows and light up a cigarette. The act of smoking in front of your parents, then and even now, horrifies me, and the ease and comfort with which he pulled a long drag and exhaled out of his nose, then settled in his seat like the king of the summer, shocked and amazed me. His mother did not seem to notice, or perhaps she’d taught herself not to.
I hadn’t been around Scott for some time, and I was surprised by his gregariousness. When he quit the baseball team his Freshman year, it created ripples through the athletic department and the lives of my brother and his friends. Scott was the only Freshman on the Varsity team, and the Varsity coach was a legendary asshole, a 70s-style hustle & grit guy who despised hippies, pot smokers, and vagrants, all of which Scott had energetically become. The coach put out an order, that nobody on any baseball team was allowed to even associate with Scott, an order that was complied with to varying degrees. Because of that, or just general growing apart, or some combination, by the summer before their senior year my brother and Scott barely knew each other.
He held court in his front seat, debated politics with his mother, earnestly asked me about my summer and how Chris was doing. Then on the road to my house, he asked his mom to pull over.
“Here,” he said, pointing with the two fingers cradling a butt, “on this dirt path.”
We pulled into a small access road, one that looped back in a circle to the main road, and about 3/4 through the path he said, “Stop. There.”
Before us, through a patch of branches and leaves, was a two-story, all-white concrete structure, just barely off the road but obscured enough that you could pass by it a hundred times without noticing, which I very likely may have.
“It’s called the Acid House.” Scott said.
The building looked like a poured-concrete spaceship: long, stretching arches; large, circular windows sprinkled in odd locations; all of it perfectly symmetrical. A bizarre architectural oddity that looked like it belonged on a movie set, or at the nearby Decordova sculpture museum.
“So the story,” he continues, “is that back in the 70s this crazy artist lived here, and he built this crazy fucking thing to host like acid parties and orgies and shit like that. The guy who owns it now, he get pissed if he sees you hanging around outside, like whatever dude either you built it or you decided to keep it there. Fuck I’d love to go in there.”
We stared at it for a few minutes. How had this thing been here all this time, less than a mile from my house, something truly unique, and I hadn’t even found it? I was an explorer. How did I miss this?
Mrs. Anderson brought me home. My mom asked about the class and I groaned about how pointless it was and that I was absolutely not going back tomorrow. She shook her head. It was still so hot out, even though the afternoon was getting late. I went down to the cool basement and turned on my playstation.