Business School for the Hopelessly Creative

I used to run with a pretty wild crowd. In the 1980s, I lived on Polk Street in San Francisco, which had fallen from grace around the same time that freebase cocaine made its appearance on the streets. Once a stately urban gay neighborhood, Polk Street had disintegrated into a drive-by delicatessen of troubled young boys. This was before the internet, mind you, so the only way to proffer one's wares was on the street or, if the hustler had hustled up enough business, in either the Bay Area Reporter or the Sentinel (a Republican-owned gay newspaper).

Add to this mix a shy, starry-eyed homo from the suburbs, recently returned to California from an Eastern boarding school. Too proud and too shy to sell himself, he chose instead to observe. But like a social anthropologist, eventually the observer becomes a fringe member of the group he has chosen to study. No, I never turned tricks for a living (okay, one, but it was awful) but I did start to hang out with the transgendered prostitutes, the junkies, the wayward youth and of course the fabulous drag queens. My roommate John was a bitter, soft spoken waiter from Modesto. For the big parties (Gay Pride, Halloween) he transformed into Vickie Vomit, a transvestite terrorist with exploding bracelets and breasts concealing grenade launchers. A fearless defender of the deaf and hard of hearing, he once beat a hustler to a pulp with his high heels. The hustler probably never knew that John was an avenging angel for his dear gay friend who fell victim to the hustler's larceny during an ill-fated trick.

John taught me the proper forms of address: "girl" for your friends, "girlfriend" for people whose beads you are about to read, and "Miss Thing" for the great unwashed masses. He taught me to shake out a wig, the correct amount of white Aqua Net to use, and how to select a dress that conveys both sexiness and a sense of humor at the same time. We dragged together, and it was great.

Now, flash forward 20 years. I just got accepted to business school at USC. I am a portly bear with a goatee. I look a lot like my dad. In the interim, I spent time in the mental health system, gave up drugs, worked for the Italian government (no, not a schizophrenic delusion!), produced a documentary on Mexican wrestlers, and addressed the United Nations on two occasions about the virtues and pitfalls of internet telephony via satellite. Future posts will be concerned with recounting the attempts of this square peg to soften his edges and fit into the big round world of business.