At sixteen, you think you know everything. You have a favorite movie, a favorite album, and a favorite book at that point in your life, and nobody can tell you there’s more to it. The Grapes of Wrath feels like a long, dusty march of suffering; As I Lay Dying is a confusing chorus of long-dead Southerners; The Waste Land reads like word salad from someone who overdosed on despair and had Ezra Pound handy to cut out half his words; and a heavily-censored version of Howl — well, it was scandalous, but only because some guy told us it was, and we had to learn for ourselves why.

That guy was Steve Comiskey, and he was uniquely energetic about it.

You have to picture the mid-1980s. He’s in front of a classroom of rejects from “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” the smell of chalk dust and old paper hangs in the air, and he’s trying to show us there was something alive in those “old words someone recited 30 years ago at the Six Gallery” (he typed ironically 40 years later). He asked questions that hung like smoke: “Why is Steinbeck so angry? What’s Eliot mourning? What’s really dying in Faulkner’s South — the body, or the soul?” Nobody answered, and he didn’t rescue us. He let silence do the job. Heck, it was first period, and I probably had an assignment due in another class a couple of hours later.

At the time, I didn’t have the experience to grasp what those writers were screaming about. Still, something about the way he spoke, the way his eyes lit up when he read a line, the way he made poetry feel dangerous, put something in my head about literature being more than an assignment. He planted a vision of a lifestyle that didn’t bloom until much later. Hell, I’d only known one lifestyle at the time: boring, suburban Indianapolis kid.

I had a lot of good teachers at Warren Central. Mr. Essex told me I had a brain for computer programming. (I’ll rant on that misguided piece of encouragement later, but we’ll suppose he was right for now; it is a career.) Mr. Armstrong told me I had a head for accounting. (Maybe. Dad was a CFO. How could that go wrong?) Mr. Reed taught me how to look beneath the surface of stories and catch the deeper current in a symbol or a metaphor. Mrs. Clark showed me a formula for writing an argumentative essay: intro, thesis, argument, citation, summary. Perfect for a kid with a “brain for computer programming.” I still use it daily.

Mr. Comiskey was different. When I chose to write an essay instead of taking the final exam (because, heck, Norma Clark gave me a formula for a free hour of smugness while everyone took a test), he didn’t just give me the “A.” He announced in front of the class, “Darrin was the only one who chose the paper, which is smart, because he’s good at it.”

That was it. “He’s good at it.” It wasn’t a pep talk. It wasn’t a ceremony. It was just a statement, but it hit harder than anything else any teacher had said to me in 12 years.

I carried that line with me through college, through business meetings, through decades of life that didn’t quite go the way sixteen-year-old me imagined. Most of all, if I wasn’t writing something, even if it was just a tech manual or business proposal (which always seemed to fall on me), that sentence sat somewhere in the back of my head, tapping its foot, waiting.

In college, I retook 20th Century American Literature, figuring it’d be an easy “A.” Heck, I’d already read all the books. What can go wrong? Something strange happened, though. I ended up challenging the grad-student instructors with little insights I’d absorbed from Mr. Comiskey’s lectures. They’d cite the accepted interpretations, and I’d push back with the questions about dignity, faith, suffering, and survival. Even then, I didn’t get that I was grasping more context than they were. I thought I was being a pain in the ass and filling up the hour when nobody else would speak up.

Yeah, I went on to live a practical, safe life — tech, business, data analytics, software engineering, things you can measure. Still, there’s always been this quiet hum underneath it all, a weird predilection for finding deeper meaning in the data.

I write now — spare time novels, essays, random blog posts like this — and every time I hit a sentence that feels “off,” or slightly scandalous, or strangely quirky, I think of Steve Comiskey, holding the zeroxed and redacted copy of Howl, like contraband (he “loved the smell”), with all of the good parts covered with Sharpie. (I still have it in my filing cabinet as a laugh.) He smiled wryly at the time, probably knowing it would end up being my gateway to William Burroughs, Gary Snider, Ken Kesey, Lawrence Ferlingetti, Jack London, and my hero, Kerouac.

So, hey, Steve Comiskey, you probably never knew you eventually made a crappy, unsold writer out of that slacker kid in first period back in ’86, but you did …

… and, now, I thank you!