Dallas, 1995

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That first time in Dallas, fresh off a plane from rural Upstate, I unwittingly stepped into the beginning of the rest of my life.

There are certain demarcation points in life, clear forks in the branching path, and whichever road you choose, it changes your course forever.

Even if you can’t see that from there. Especially then.

I was 17, and it was only my second time in an airplane. As I exited the cabin, the heat hit me like a thrown comforter, pulled straight from the dryer and lobbed at my head. I walked the gray carpet up the jetway to the terminal, my bag in tow, disoriented by the sudden change in climate, and came blinking into the bright light of a Texas summer afternoon.

It was August of 1995. Alanis Morissette and the Toadies had the top songs on the radio. Bill Clinton was president. The Cowboys were about to start another Super Bowl-winning season. The internet was still a novel idea. It would be a full six years before planes crashing into the twin towers in lower Manhattan made airports into an Orwellian nightmare. The 90s were a time when you could meet a friend with a layover for lunch at an Airport food court, and security, such as it was, wouldn’t even think twice.

My family had walked me to my gate back in New York, because the world was still human then. And for much the same reason, my priest-minder stood there waiting for me at my destination, wearing his characteristic wry grin beneath rimless glasses, like he knew something you didn’t, but he was about to share it, and you were going to be so entertained when you found out.

A balding man in his early 40s, he was lean and athletic, and his understated speaking voice buzzed around the edges with a kind of boundless, childlike energy. He wore a white guayabera over his clerics and Roman collar, and he welcomed me enthusiastically before leading me towards the parking area.

He was my uncle’s cousin, and he had started giving retreats to the boys in my family a couple years prior, before being re-assigned from New York to Texas. We knew each other fairly well by the time my plane touched down at DFW, and it was at his invitation that I had decided to spend part of my summer as a counselor at a summer camp for Mexican boys.

He hadn’t come by himself, but for the life of me I can’t dig up the memory of who was with him, even though I’m sure it was someone I later came to know. Priests from his order never traveled alone. Whoever it was, together, they led me to a nondescript Plymouth minivan, and we pulled out on the sun-bleached asphalt and onto the highway, where we made our way through the seemingly-endless flat expanse of Dallas suburban sprawl. Everywhere I looked, there was a sea of strip malls and restaurant chains, the static-spark energy of commerce heavy on the tide of traffic. As a kid from a dead-end road in a tiny town in the backwoods outside Binghamton, this was a major civilizational upgrade, and I was a bit starstruck with it all.

Unbeknownst to me, I had just taken the first steps in a whole new life. I couldn’t see it from there, concealed as it was beneath the disguise of a simple two-week summer escape.

What I did know was that I was stir-crazy and desperate for adventure, and for the first time in a long time, I wasn’t stuck staring at the same four walls, wanting to get the hell out of Dodge.

Small-town living was, for me, like wearing chains. In Kirkwood, my little one-horse redneck town, I felt like Harrison Bergeron, gazing out windows at defunct farms, trailer parks, and ancient gray-brown barns surrendering slowly to entropy in a slow, lazy slough of bent and broken boards. It was a landscape like Ireland — or so I’d been told by those who’d been — lush and verdant and rolling with hills, but with none of the Irish charm. The most magical thing that ever happened growing up was when the fireflies slow danced out back in the warm evenings of late June, blinking out indecipherable messages to their companions under a glittering canopy of stars.

But now I was in Texas, just as big and bright in person as I’d heard about in the songs.

The possibilities felt endless.

When I arrived at the school, the place where I’d be helping to lead a summer camp for rich young Mexican heirs, I was introduced to a young man my age at the bottom of the stairwell heading up to my room. He stood sweating in a red soccer shirt and backwards baseball hat, having been working the school grounds with the landscaping crew for his summer job. He was the nephew of my priest-friend, and while I was anxious to check out where I would be staying, in just a few minutes of conversation, we hit it off like we’d known each other our whole lives.

The next day, on the way to Fort Worth for a day of Texas-themed sightseeing, we sat in the back seat of a car mapping out the Venn diagram of our respective interests and finishing each other’s movie quotes as his mom and her priest-brother chatted quietly up front, throwing approving glances back every now and then.

Later that afternoon, I realized with a shock as I walked the old stockyards, laughing with my new acquaintance over rough-hewn crates of penny candies, that I was 17 and had never really had a friend before. Someone who got me and shared my interests, sense of humor, and enthusiasm.

And now I did. This was just something qualitatively different than anything I’d experienced in nearly a dozen years of public school.

The camp itself was fun, but the memories are all a blur, like candies melted together in a bag after sitting too long in a hot car. Afternoons spent supervising as the boys screwed around in the pool. A trip to two different Six Flags in the span of a week. A dinner at Medieval Times. Cafeteria Mexican food more authentic than any taco I’d ever eaten growing up. A shopping trip to the local mall where each young boy was handed a wad of spending cash bigger than I had ever seen. A trip back from Houston to Dallas on I-45, with me driving one of three Ford Econoline vans through rain so heavy I may as well have been piloting a submarine. When the rain cleared up, we raced each other at speeds well above the posted limit down the wide open stretch of straight, flat highway.

That camp was, for reasons that were never fully explained to me at the time, the last of an era. It was essentially a two-week recruitment session designed to be so much fun, those boys would go home and beg their well-off parents to pay the tuition and send them to the states for school. But the Mexican peso crisis the previous year had dangerously weakened the country’s economic situation, and made it a dicey proposition for even the wealthy to send their boys to an expensive American boarding school. Enrollments were drying up, and the Texas campus was forced to shut down. Simple as that. The few boarders who remained interested would be consolidated into an academy at a different location somewhere in the Midwest.

That left an entire floor of the building permanently empty. A floor full of furnished dorm rooms, as vacant as a ghost town. I didn’t want to go back to my depressing little Podunk hometown. I had zero interest in enduring another year of mind-numbingly boring homeschool, working afternoons and weekends at the local hardware store so I could buy video games, and clothing that didn’t come to me in a black hand-me-down trash bag from my cousins across town. I saw an opportunity floating in front of me, and I reached for it like a drowning man. I had found a vibrant city full of young people and things to do, and best of all, I’d made a friend. Several, in fact, as I’d gotten to know some of the other cast of characters who also lived at the school.

The Mexican academy was just one segment of the larger campus. Most of the facility was dedicated to The Highlands, an American private Catholic school that was just about to open back up for the fall semester. I talked to the priests and asked if there was any way I could stay for my senior year. I couldn’t pay the tuition, I told them, but I’d be willing to help out with what I could.

To my surprise, they agreed.

In retrospect, I think they may have been recruiting me as well, and were hoping for me to ask. But I was too young and naive to see any such machinations. I felt as though I’d won some kind of jackpot. As the child of a large family who had always shared a room, I was thrilled to have my choice of accommodations from the now-empty second floor. I chose two by the stairs, with an adjoining bathroom in the middle. I’d use one room for my desk and computer, the other for my bed. It was like having my own apartment.

I flew home with my heart set on my new mission. I couldn’t take being cooped up anymore. I’d be 18 in a few months, I told my parents, at a family barbecue over the noise of cousins rope-jumping into the family pond, so while I’d love to get their blessing, I had decided I was going either way.

I had made up my mind, and nobody was going to change it.